“The Most Dangerous Game” has a near-constant haunting and foreboding mood—established right off the bat by the introduction of Ship-Trap Island as a place of dark mystery (literally, given the black night in which the reader arrives at the narrative). “Sailors have a curious dread of the place,” Whitney announces to Rainsford while they pass the island on the ship. The unease surrounding the island—and the uneasiness of the reader—is sustained through Connell’s language and metaphor, as when Rainsford falls into the “blood-warm” waters of the Caribbean.
Even the portions of the plot that could be uplifting, such as Rainsford’s discovery of the mansion in the jungle, are rendered ominous by Connell’s language: the spiked iron gate of the “palatial chateau” separates Rainsford from “pointed towers” that “plunge,” like a knife, “upward into the gloom.” Even before the full horrors of Zaroff's character are revealed, the reader is meant to feel an ominous sense of danger and unease.
