Seriality and Suspense in Podcast Fiction: Toward a Conceptual Framework for New Narrative Forms in Audio Media

Abstract

Podcast fiction has reactivated serialized storytelling in a media environment defined by mobile listening, platform distribution, and participatory audience cultures. While seriality is not new, audio fiction podcasts reconfigure suspense through affordances unavailable to print—performed voice, embodied temporality, sound design, and the infrastructural rhythms of digital release. This conceptual framework article synthesizes narrative theory, sound studies, and digital storytelling scholarship to model how podcast fiction produces and sustains suspense across episodes and seasons. I propose the Sonic Serial Suspense Framework (S3F), a multi-layer model that links (1) release-temporal seriality, (2) episode-internal segmentation, (3) sonic narratological cues (voice, music, effects, silence), and (4) paratextual participation (feeds, teasers, social media, listener communities). The framework treats suspense as an emergent effect of epistemic management (controlled access to information), affective stakes (care and risk), and temporal delay (withholding and pacing) shaped by audio’s “acousmatic” and intimate address. After detailing the model’s theoretical justification, the article outlines applications for researchers: analytic protocols for episode-level coding, comparative study designs across genres (horror, mystery, romance, comedy), and methods for tracing how platformization and listening practices influence narrative form. The article concludes by identifying key research problems for humanities scholarship, including the ethics of immersion, the politics of listening, and the implications of bingeability and algorithmic recommendation for serial suspense. Throughout, the study foregrounds podcast fiction as a distinctive contemporary site for rethinking seriality, narrative theory, audio media, and digital storytelling.

Introduction

Podcast fiction—scripted audio storytelling distributed through podcast infrastructures—has become one of the most visible contemporary venues for serialized narrative. The form draws on long-standing traditions of radio drama and audiobook performance while reframing them through the conditions of digital distribution: RSS feeds, platform catalogs, mobile devices, headphones, and an “always available” archive that coexists with weekly or seasonal release patterns (Spinelli and Dann; Llinares, Fox, and Berry). This convergence raises a core humanities problem: how does podcast fiction’s audio mediality and release ecology reshape seriality and suspense as narrative phenomena?

In print, seriality historically emerged through installment publishing and periodical culture, producing suspense by delaying information and segmenting plot (a genealogy often invoked when discussing nineteenth-century serialized fiction). Yet podcast fiction does not merely “return” to earlier serial forms. It introduces new narrative techniques—performed voices, spatialized sound, silence as meaning, paratextual circulation within apps and social media—that complicate how suspense is built and felt. Audio fiction also restructures the temporality of reading/listening: a listener cannot “see ahead” spatially on a page in the same way, and playback unfolds as time, even when one can fast-forward. The result is a form of suspense that is simultaneously ancient (anticipation, delay, cliffhangers) and newly engineered through sonic design and platform rhythms.

This article offers a conceptual framework rather than an empirical measurement study. Its primary goal is to provide researchers with a coherent model for analyzing how podcast fiction constructs suspense across serial installments and how the format shapes character growth and audience involvement. The contribution is threefold:

• Conceptual : defining podcast-fiction seriality as a layered phenomenon spanning release schedules, episode structures, and sonic narratological cues.
• Theoretical : integrating narrative theory (plot, focalization, paratext) with sound studies (listening, acousmatic voice, sonic space) and media theory (remediation, platform distribution).
• Methodological : proposing research applications—coding schemes, comparative designs, and operational definitions—for humanities scholars working with audio media and digital storytelling.

Two clarifications are necessary. First, “podcast fiction” here refers to fictional narrative podcasts that are scripted and produced as serial audio works, including dramatized ensembles, narrated “found audio” formats, and hybrid docufiction. Second, while suspense is often associated with thriller or horror genres, the framework treats suspense as a broader narratological effect: an organized relation between not-yet-known information, not-yet-realized outcomes, and not-yet-ended temporal experience (Brooks; Vorderer, Wulff, and Friedrichsen). In other words, suspense is not only a genre marker; it is a technique for managing attention and expectation across time.

Podcast Fiction as a Problem for Narrative Theory

Narrative theory has long emphasized how stories manage time (order, duration, frequency), knowledge (who knows what, when), and perspective (focalization) (Genette; Chatman). Podcast fiction intensifies these concerns because audio is time-based and because voice and sound make perspective sensorial rather than merely descriptive. A whispered confession, a distorted recording, a sudden cut to silence—these are not simply stylistic flourishes but mechanisms that govern what can be known, trusted, or anticipated.

At the same time, podcast fiction is embedded in digital media ecologies in which paratexts circulate continuously: episode titles, thumbnails, “previously on” recaps, trailer drops, and listener speculation in comments and forums. Paratext theory—initially formulated for books—becomes newly relevant because podcast paratexts can be updated, A/B tested, or algorithmically reordered (Genette, Paratexts ; Gray). Thus, suspense in podcast fiction is not only inside the episode; it is also engineered around it.

Research Questions and Scope

Guided by the above, the article addresses the following research questions:

1. How does podcast fiction operationalize seriality across release schedules, episode segmentation, and season arcs?
2. What suspense techniques are distinctive to audio media, especially those grounded in voice, sound design, and listening conditions?
3. How do paratexts and audience practices—enabled by digital storytelling infrastructures—feed back into suspense construction and character development?
4. What analytic vocabulary and methodological steps can humanities researchers adopt to study these effects comparatively?

The article proceeds by presenting the Sonic Serial Suspense Framework (S3F), justifying it through relevant theory, and demonstrating its use through applications and research protocols.

Conceptual Model: The Sonic Serial Suspense Framework (S3F)

The S3F model treats suspense in podcast fiction as an emergent effect produced by the interaction of serial segmentation, sonic narratology, and participatory paratexts. It is designed as a conceptual framework : a structured set of constructs, relations, and analytic prompts that can guide interpretive analysis and mixed-method research without presupposing a single genre, platform, or production style.

Model Overview

S3F has four layers. Each layer can be studied independently, but the framework’s main claim is that suspense in podcast fiction is strongest—and most formally distinctive—when techniques align across layers.

• Layer 1: Release-Temporal Seriality (the rhythm of publication and waiting)
• Layer 2: Episode-Internal Segmentation (micro-seriality within an episode)
• Layer 3: Sonic Narratology (voice, sound, music, silence as narrative operators)
• Layer 4: Paratextual Participation (platform and community practices that extend the narrative field)

Figure 1 provides a conceptual diagram of the framework.

Core Constructs

S3F defines suspense as a function of three core constructs that are widely compatible with existing scholarship: epistemic gap (what is not yet known), affective stakes (why it matters), and temporal delay (how long resolution is withheld) (Vorderer, Wulff, and Friedrichsen; Brooks). The framework’s distinctive intervention is to specify how these constructs are mediated by audio and serial distribution.

Epistemic Gap (E)

Epistemic gaps include mysteries, withheld motivations, ambiguous evidence, and unstable narratorial reliability. In podcast fiction, epistemic gaps are often intensified by “audio evidence” motifs—recordings, tapes, voicemail, radio transmissions—which simultaneously promise authenticity and invite doubt. This intersects with questions of focalization and narrative levels in classical narratology (Genette).

Affective Stakes (A)

Affective stakes involve character attachment, moral investment, fear, or desire. Podcast fiction often cultivates stakes through vocal intimacy and repeated auditory exposure, which can encourage parasocial bonds between listener and recurring voices (Horton and Wohl). The regularity of serialized listening may make character growth feel less like discrete chapters and more like a relationship sustained over time.

Temporal Delay (D)

Delay operates at two scales: (1) internal pacing within an episode, and (2) external pacing created by release schedules and season gaps. Delay is central to seriality historically, but podcast infrastructures add a second temporality: the archive allows immediate continuation (binge listening) while publication schedules still structure anticipation. S3F therefore distinguishes release delay (calendar time) from playback delay (experienced time in listening).

Operationalizing Suspense as a Conceptual Index

Because researchers often seek ways to compare episodes or series without collapsing interpretation into simplistic metrics, S3F proposes a light formalization that is explicitly heuristic. Let a segment’s suspense potential be represented as:

(1)

In Eq. (1), denotes epistemic gap intensity, affective stakes, and temporal delay; are weights determined by genre, series conventions, or research design. The equation is not offered as a universal psychological law; it functions as a conceptual scaffold for coding and comparison across audio narratives.

To reflect seriality across episodes, we can define cumulative suspense across an episode sequence as:

(2)

Eq. (2) introduces a discount factor (0<≤1) representing how earlier suspense cues persist (or fade) in listener memory. This aligns with the intuition that serialized suspense relies on retention across installments—through recaps, motifs, and unresolved questions—while acknowledging that memory decays and must be refreshed through narrative design.

Layer 1: Release-Temporal Seriality

Release-temporal seriality concerns the calendar-shaped dimension of narrative: the time between episodes, seasons, and hiatuses; the ritual of a drop; and the infrastructural signals that announce continuity (feed updates, notifications). This layer intersects with how platforms remediate older episodic forms (Bolter and Grusin) and how media institutions cultivate habitual attention (Couldry and Hepp).

Key variables include:

• Cadence : weekly, biweekly, binge-release, irregular.
• Seasonality : arcs bounded by season finales; long breaks that restructure memory and expectation.
• Hiatus risk : uncertainty about continuation can produce extra-textual suspense (“Will it return?”), a platform-era variant of serial instability.
• Archive availability : the possibility of immediate continuation competes with release-based anticipation.

Layer 2: Episode-Internal Segmentation (Micro-Seriality)

Even when a listener binge-consumes episodes, each episode is typically segmented to simulate installment logic: cold opens, recaps, act-like scene clusters, ad breaks, and end tags. These segment boundaries become suspense levers. A sudden cut to theme music can operate like the turn of a page in print, but it is also a sonic event that interrupts and reorients attention.

Podcast fiction commonly uses:

• Cold open enigmas : a striking scene whose context is deferred.
• Recaps as epistemic re-weighting : “Previously on” can highlight certain gaps, steering interpretation.
• Ad breaks as enforced pauses : interruptions can intensify cliffhangers or deflate them, depending on placement.
• Tags and stingers : brief end segments that re-open uncertainty after apparent closure.

Layer 3: Sonic Narratology

Sonic narratology names the set of audio-specific resources that carry narratorial force: vocal performance, microphone proximity, spatialization, music cues, sound effects, and silence. Scholarship on sound emphasizes that listening is embodied and situational; audio is not “less” than visual media but differently structured (Sterne; Lacey). In narrative terms, podcast fiction can render focalization through sonic texture: breath, tremor, distance, distortion, and environmental acoustics can imply mood, reliability, and spatial relations without explicit description.

A crucial concept is the acousmatic voice —a voice heard without a visible source—which can produce uncertainty about identity, location, and authority (Chion). Podcast fiction often multiplies acousmatic conditions: voices arrive through recordings, transmissions, phone calls, and “found audio,” making voice itself a vehicle for epistemic suspense.

Layer 4: Paratextual Participation

Paratexts shape how narratives are encountered: titles, descriptions, artwork, trailers, and metadata structure expectations before listening begins (Genette, Paratexts ; Gray). Podcast paratexts are also participatory: creators and listeners interact in social media threads, live shows, Q&As, and crowdfunding updates, all of which can influence suspense by encouraging speculation and extending narrative time into communal waiting.

Paratextual participation matters for podcast fiction because it can:

• Amplify suspense by circulating hints and partial revelations.
• Redirect interpretation through creator commentary or promotional framing.
• Create “distributed canon” where story-relevant information is dispersed across episodes and external channels.
• Stabilize or destabilize trust (e.g., when marketing promises one genre but the narrative shifts).

Table: Taxonomy of Suspense Techniques in Podcast Fiction

Table 1 maps common suspense devices to their audio-specific realizations and their serial functions.

Theoretical Justification

S3F draws its explanatory power from three intersecting literatures: narrative theory, sound/media studies, and digital storytelling studies. Rather than treating podcast fiction as a simple “audio version” of print or television, the framework adopts a remediation perspective: new media refashion older forms while adding constraints and affordances that reorganize attention and meaning (Bolter and Grusin; McLuhan).

Narrative Theory: Plot, Delay, and Serial Knowledge

Narrative theory provides the baseline vocabulary for serial suspense: plot as a system of anticipation and retrospection, and suspense as an effect generated by structured delay (Brooks). Plot is not simply “what happens,” but the organization of desire and expectation—how the narrative makes the audience want to know what will happen next. In serialized podcast fiction, this desire is distributed across installment boundaries and sustained through repetition and recalibration (recaps, motifs, episode tags).

Classical narratology’s distinctions among story, discourse, and narration remain useful for podcast fiction (Chatman). However, audio complicates these distinctions because narration can be simultaneously discursive (voiceover) and embodied (performance), and because sound effects can function as narratorial commentary rather than mere “world noise.” The boundary between diegesis and discourse becomes porous when, for example, a musical cue signals irony or dread without being “heard” by characters.

Genette’s categories of time—order, duration, frequency—are likewise central (Genette, Narrative Discourse ). Podcast fiction often plays with anachrony through “found” materials (tapes, interviews), where the narration is layered: an event is recorded, discovered later, edited, and then heard by the listener. Each layer creates opportunities for suspense: what is on the tape, who recorded it, and what has been omitted?

Suspense as Epistemic and Affective Structure

Humanities approaches frequently treat suspense as a formal effect, while communication and psychology have also modeled suspense in terms of uncertainty and outcome desirability (Vorderer, Wulff, and Friedrichsen; Zillmann). S3F does not reduce suspense to a single mechanism; instead, it treats suspense as a compound of epistemic and affective organization. The epistemic dimension concerns knowledge distribution: who knows what, and how reliably. The affective dimension concerns attachment, fear, hope, and dread, which can be intensified by vocal intimacy and recurring exposure.

Importantly, suspense in podcast fiction is not always resolved. Many series sustain “structural suspense” by keeping core mysteries open across seasons, relying on partial answers that generate new questions. This resembles serial television’s long-arc storytelling, where resolution is often deferred to maintain continuation (Mittell). Podcast fiction inherits such logics but adapts them to audio and to different production economies, where season renewals may depend on funding, downloads, or patron support—conditions that can be thematized within paratexts (Spinelli and Dann).

Sound Studies: Listening, Voice, and the Acousmatic Condition

Sound studies emphasizes that modern listening is historically shaped by technologies of reproduction and by cultural expectations about what sound signifies (Sterne). Podcast fiction belongs to a lineage in which recorded sound carries an aura of evidence and intimacy, even as it is edited and staged. The “audible past” of sound reproduction, from phonography to radio, informs why “recorded confession” or “archival tape” tropes feel compelling: they promise access to a hidden reality while also foregrounding mediation.

Chion’s work on audiovisual media is especially valuable for conceptualizing the acousmatic voice and the narrative power of hearing without seeing (Chion). In podcast fiction, nearly all voices are acousmatic from the listener’s standpoint. This condition can heighten suspense by making identity and spatial relations uncertain: a voice may be close-miked (intimate) while its source is unknown (threatening or alluring). Microphone technique becomes an interpretive cue.

Listening is also socially and politically situated. Podcast listening often occurs through headphones in private or semi-private spaces—commutes, chores, solitary walks—creating conditions of immersion that differ from shared television viewing or public cinema (Lacey). This “listening situation” matters for suspense: the form can recruit attention in ways that feel like internal thought, confession, or haunting, even when the narrative is not explicitly second-person.

Digital Storytelling and Remediation: Platforms, Archives, and Bingeability

Digital storytelling scholarship emphasizes immersion, interactivity, and the reshaping of narrative by computational and networked environments (Murray; Ryan). Podcast fiction is usually not interactive in the strong sense, but it is deeply networked: distribution through apps and platforms, circulation through social media, and supplementary materials hosted online. These conditions create what might be called soft interactivity : listeners’ interpretive labor (speculation, theory-building, re-listening) becomes publicly visible and can influence creators’ paratextual framing or even narrative direction.

Remediation helps explain why podcast fiction can feel simultaneously “old” (radio drama) and “new” (platform-native). Older audio storytelling conventions—announcers, episodic arcs, theme music—are repurposed under new constraints: dynamic ad insertion, variable playback speeds, algorithmic discovery, and the frictionless archive (Bolter and Grusin; Spinelli and Dann). These constraints reshape suspense mechanics. For instance, a carefully placed pause may be undermined when listeners speed up playback, while a cliffhanger may lose force when the next episode autoplays immediately.

Paratexts and Audience Involvement

Genette’s concept of paratext—threshold materials that frame interpretation—becomes particularly salient for podcast fiction because paratexts are platform-mediated and continuously updated (Genette, Paratexts ). Gray’s work on media paratexts further underscores how promos and spoilers organize anticipation (Gray). In podcast fiction, a trailer can function like a promise of future suspense, while an episode description can inadvertently spoil a twist. Even episode artwork can signal genre (horror typography, noir photography) and thus tune the listener’s expectation for suspense intensity.

Audience involvement also intersects with parasocial interaction: recurring voices can feel like familiar presences, intensifying investment in character arcs (Horton and Wohl). This does not imply that all listeners experience the same intimacy, nor that parasociality is always positive; rather, it provides a theoretical pathway for understanding why long-running podcast fiction can generate durable attachments that sustain suspense across extended delays.

Applications: Research Designs, Analytic Protocols, and Illustrative Cases

This section translates S3F into concrete applications for researchers. Because podcast fiction is heterogeneous—ranging from anthology horror to ongoing sitcoms—the goal is not to prescribe a single method but to provide adaptable protocols for comparative study.

Application 1: Episode-Level Coding for Sonic Suspense

Researchers can operationalize S3F by coding episodes at two granularities: (1) segment-level (scenes, breaks, tags), and (2) sonic-event-level (voice shifts, motifs, silences). The guiding question is how epistemic gaps, affective stakes, and delay are cued sonically and aligned with segment boundaries.

Table 2 provides an example coding scheme suitable for qualitative analysis with optional quantification (e.g., to compute a descriptive “suspense profile” across episodes using Eq. (1) and Eq. (2)).

Application 2: Mapping Serial Rhythm Across Calendar Time

To study release-temporal seriality, researchers can build a “release rhythm map” that tracks publication dates, hiatuses, season boundaries, and paratext drops (trailers, bonus episodes). The analytic hypothesis is that suspense is partially organized by waiting, and waiting is socially experienced through reminders, notifications, and community talk.

Figure 2 describes a timeline visualization that researchers can generate for any series.

This design supports comparative research questions: do horror podcasts rely more on long hiatus suspense than comedy fiction? Do anthology series produce different rhythms of anticipation than continuous serials? How do “bonus” episodes function as suspense management—bridging delays, re-centering mysteries, or re-attaching listeners to characters?

Application 3: Comparative Close Reading Across Podcast Fiction Formats

S3F supports comparative work across at least three recurring podcast fiction formats:

• Dramatized ensemble serials (multi-actor scenes, cinematic sound design): suspense often hinges on scene-level pacing and sonic staging of space.
• Framed narration / “host” formats (a central narrator curates events, sometimes as a broadcaster or archivist): suspense often hinges on reliability, confession, and the handling of “evidence.”
• Anthology and semi-anthology series (episodic stories with recurring mythologies): suspense often hinges on long-range motif recognition and cumulative worldbuilding.

These formats are not mutually exclusive, but naming them helps researchers avoid treating “podcast fiction” as a single homogeneous genre. It also foregrounds a key narratological point: seriality can be carried either by plot continuation, by recurring voice/persona, or by recurring world logic. All three can generate suspense, but through different pathways.

Application 4: Illustrative Case Vignettes (Primary Sources)

The following brief vignettes demonstrate how S3F can structure analysis. They are not presented as exhaustive interpretations but as examples of how to locate suspense techniques within the model.

Vignette A: Intimate Voice and Serial Attachment

In long-running serial podcast fiction such as The Magnus Archives (Sims), repeated address and recurring voices can function as attachment engines. Even when an episode presents a self-contained “statement,” the cumulative effect depends on how recurring narrators and institutions accrue moral ambiguity over time. From an S3F perspective, suspense is not only “what monster appears,” but “what the institution is becoming” and “who can be trusted,” sustained across release-temporal delay and refreshed through motifs and recap-like framing.

Vignette B: “Evidence” as Sonic Object

Fiction podcasts that organize narrative around recordings—such as investigative frames in series like Limetown (Akers and Bronkie) or similar “found audio” traditions—deploy the recording itself as a suspense object. Distortion, tape hiss, abrupt cuts, and missing segments can be read not as mere aesthetics but as epistemic operators: they materialize the limits of knowledge. S3F highlights how sonic narratology (Layer 3) becomes inseparable from epistemic gap (E) and delay (D).

Vignette C: Worldbuilding Through Serial Broadcast

In Welcome to Night Vale (Fink and Cranor), the conceit of a community radio broadcast organizes seriality through the recurrence of a voice and a setting rather than a single mystery plot. Suspense appears in smaller doses—odd announcements, recurring threats, gradual shifts in civic reality—but accumulates as a long-form atmosphere. Here, paratextual participation (fan culture, live shows, discourse around episodes) is especially relevant to S3F’s Layer 4, as communal interpretation can become part of the pleasure of anticipation.

Vignette D: Serial Cliffhangers and Platform-Conditioned Listening

High-profile audio dramas such as Homecoming (Horowitz and Bloomberg) and thriller-adjacent serial podcasts frequently deploy episode-ending reversals and tightly paced scenes that resemble television’s act structures, but with distinctly audio tactics: cuts to silence, voicemail stingers, and musical stabs designed for headphone intensity. S3F encourages researchers to ask how these cliffhangers behave under different listening practices: do they function differently for weekly listeners than for binge listeners who immediately autoplay the next episode?

Application 5: A Simple Analytical Workflow

For researchers seeking a repeatable protocol (for individual analysis or team coding), S3F can be implemented as the following workflow:

1. Corpus definition : select series/season(s), noting genre, release pattern, and platform availability (Spinelli and Dann).
2. Paratext capture : archive episode titles, descriptions, artwork, trailers, and announcements at the time of study (Genette, Paratexts ; Gray).
3. Segmentation : divide each episode into structural units (cold open, recap, scenes, breakpoints, tag).
4. Sonic event annotation : mark recurring motifs, voice conditions (distance, distortion), silence, and spatial cues (Chion; Sterne).
5. Suspense construct coding : code E/A/D intensity and type, optionally using Eq. (1) and Eq. (2) as descriptive summaries rather than explanatory proof.
6. Interpretive synthesis : produce a narratological account of how suspense is aligned across S3F layers and how character growth is paced serially.

This workflow supports both close reading and scalable comparative analysis across multiple podcast fiction series.

Discussion

S3F is motivated by a simple claim: podcast fiction generates new narrative forms not by abandoning older serial conventions, but by recombining them through audio mediality and digital distribution. The discussion below highlights four implications for humanities research: (1) the distinct temporality of listening, (2) the ethics and politics of immersive suspense, (3) the role of platformization and monetization in narrative structure, and (4) the problem of comparative evaluation across media.

The Temporality of Listening: From Page-Turn to Playback

Print suspense often relies on the page-turn and the visible thickness of what remains. Audio suspense relies on playback time and on the listener’s embodied endurance within scenes. While a listener can technically skip ahead, doing so is a different act than scanning a page; it breaks the performed temporality that audio fiction presumes. This difference is not simply technological; it is aesthetic. Audio drama has long been understood as “theater of the mind,” but podcast fiction re-embeds that theater within everyday mobility and individualized headphone space (Verma; Lacey).

This helps explain why silence is such a powerful suspense tool in podcast fiction. Silence is not just the absence of information; it becomes a temporal threat—time passing with no reassurance—and an interpretive blank that invites projection. S3F therefore treats silence as a narratological resource rather than a production artifact.

Immersion, Intimacy, and Ethical Stakes

Digital storytelling scholarship has debated the relationship between immersion and agency, especially in interactive media (Murray; Ryan). Podcast fiction, though not usually interactive, can be intensely immersive: voices enter the ear canal, close-miked breath blurs the boundary between narrator and listener, and binaural or spatialized sound can simulate proximity. These techniques can produce aesthetic pleasure, but they also raise ethical questions. Horror and thriller podcasts may deploy sonic realism that risks overwhelming some listeners, while “found audio” conceits can blur the line between fiction and documentary styles of evidence.

From a humanities perspective, the ethical problem is not simply content warnings (though those are relevant), but the politics of address: who is positioned as confidant, witness, or target? How does vocal intimacy invite trust, and how is that trust exploited for suspense? These questions intersect with parasocial theory—intimacy at a distance—and with broader concerns about mediated reality construction (Horton and Wohl; Couldry and Hepp).

Platformization and Monetization as Serial Form

Podcast distribution and monetization can influence episode structure. Ad breaks (including dynamically inserted ads) can become enforced segmentation points, shaping micro-seriality (Layer 2) and potentially reorganizing suspense placement. Similarly, crowdfunding and patron models can encourage bonus episodes, behind-the-scenes content, or early access—paratextual expansions that may stabilize serial attention during delays (Spinelli and Dann).

S3F encourages researchers to treat these factors as formal constraints rather than external noise. When an episode ends with a cliffhanger, the suspense effect may depend on whether the next episode is immediately available, paywalled, or delayed. The narrative technique cannot be fully understood without the distribution condition.

Seriality Beyond Plot: Voice as Continuity

Seriality is often conceptualized as plot continuation, but podcast fiction shows how continuity can be carried by recurring voice, tone, or auditory world logic even when plots reset episodically. This resonates with media theory on how forms persist and mutate across technological change (McLuhan; Bolter and Grusin). It also complicates cross-media comparisons: an anthology podcast might be “less serial” by plot but highly serial by affect, voice, and motif.

This matters for character growth. In some podcast fiction, character development is not delivered through visual cues or descriptive narration but through vocal change: a character’s breathing becomes more controlled, their humor dries out, their pauses lengthen, their confidence becomes performance. Researchers attentive to sonic narratology can treat vocal performance as character growth data, not merely acting style.

Limits of the Framework and Open Problems

S3F is intentionally broad, and that breadth introduces limitations:

• Genre variability : Suspense works differently in comedy, romance, and slice-of-life fiction than in horror or mystery. The weights in Eq. (1) must be tuned to genre conventions rather than assumed universal.
• Listener heterogeneity : Listening contexts differ widely, and suspense is partly situational (headphones vs speakers; solitary vs shared; distracted vs focused). S3F flags this but does not by itself measure it.
• Platform opacity : Recommendation algorithms and platform metadata practices are often not transparent, complicating Layer 4 analysis.
• Global diversity : Podcast fiction is multilingual and transnational; narrative techniques and listening cultures vary, and Anglophone paradigms should not be treated as default.

These limitations suggest future research directions: ethnographies of listening, archival studies of changing paratexts, comparative work across languages, and collaboration between humanities interpretation and computational audio analysis. The framework is meant to support such work by clarifying what, exactly, might be compared and why.

Conclusion

Podcast fiction is not merely a revival of serialized storytelling; it is a reformatting of seriality through the affordances and constraints of audio media and digital storytelling infrastructures. This article proposed the Sonic Serial Suspense Framework (S3F) to explain how suspense emerges from layered interactions among release-temporal seriality, episode-internal segmentation, sonic narratology, and paratextual participation. By integrating narrative theory with sound studies and media theory, S3F provides researchers with a vocabulary and a set of analytic procedures for studying how podcast fiction shapes anticipation, character growth, and audience involvement.

Two broader conclusions follow. First, suspense in podcast fiction is best understood as a multi-scalar phenomenon: it is built in scenes through sonic cues and pacing, and it is sustained across time through release rhythms, archives, and participatory paratexts. Second, podcast fiction foregrounds the narratological power of voice and listening: acousmatic conditions, intimacy, and sonic evidence are not decorative but structural. For humanities researchers, this makes podcast fiction a key contemporary archive for rethinking serial form, mediated attention, and the cultural politics of immersion.

References