Writers like Louise Erdrich and Stephen King use chapters cleverly. What do they tell us?

Chapters. I like ‘em.

The same probably could be said for any reader — almost every book is divided into chapters, so they come with the territory — but if you’re paying attention, you begin to spot ways writers use chapters and how those divisions alter meaning.

I’ve been thinking about chapters for a while but finally buckled down to write when Maren Longbella wrote, in a review of “The House Hunt,” “I do love short chapters.” Her argument is that, like many writers who craft page-turners, C.M. Ewan uses short chapters — there are 116 in the 423-page book, many less than a page long — to propel a work forward so rapidly that it becomes difficult to put down.

I’ve often thought something similar about the thrillers of Michael Connelly, whose chapters are longer than Ewan’s but still come in at less than 10 pages apiece. “The Lincoln Lawyer” author often cuts between a couple of points of view in his brief chapters, which establishes a speedy pace in the same way cross-cutting between two images in a movie can heighten the suspense by making us envision — and wait for — the moment when the two threads will intertwine.

Something similar happens in Louise Erdrich’s upcoming “The Mighty Red,” which contains 116 chapters in its 369 pages. That’s if my count is accurate. Erdrich’s chapters aren’t numbered in “Mighty,” which is set in 2008 and 2009 in a North Dakota community where most people have a rooting interest in which of two young men a woman named Kismet will marry.

I’ve seen folks on the Goodreads social media site say short chapters are helpful for those with attention disorders but even if you’re comfortably a long-haul reader, there’s a short-chapter bonus. Racking up chapters gives you a tiny sense of accomplishment: “I read ten chapters tonight (and let’s just consign to the small print the fact that they were two pages long).”

The speedy, short chapters of “Mighty Red” (like Ewan, Erdrich is not afraid to cut it off after less than a page) suck us in — “Oh, it’s just three more pages. I can read another chapter before I turn off the light.” But they also give “Mighty” the feel of a Robert Altman movie, like “Nashville,” which is always shifting around to capture tiny portions of a huge canvas. It’s a big, meaty book but its chapters feel like tasty snacks.

Whereas Connelly likes to end chapters on cliffhangers that encourage us to keep reading, Erdrich’s approach often finds, say, the 50th chapter starting with events that happen right after — or overlap with — the 49th chapter, shifting to a different character’s interpretation of what we just read. Erdrich’s “Mighty Red” chapters feel almost like snapshots that convey specific bits of information but that accrue deeper meaning as we race to the conclusion.

But it’s not all about short chapters. A skilled writer can make long chapters an asset, too. Eleanor Catton’s bestseller “Birnam Wood” is a bigger book than those mentioned above, at 432 densely packed pages, but it has only three chapters. It’s almost the exact opposite of what Connelly and Erdrich do. With no chapters to tell you when to quit reading, you (OK, I) keep going long past the time you’d usually quit. What Catton puts on the page is so riveting that she knows she’ll make us stretch our bedtimes.

Catton is a screenwriter as well as a novelist, so it makes sense to keep going with cinematic comparisons. Her headlong “Birnam Wood,” about a group of environmental anarchists who run afoul of a soulless billionaire, has the feel of movies, like “Dog Day Afternoon” or “1917,″ that create the illusion of being one long scene so compelling that you can’t stop watching/reading.

Stephen King, who knows a thing or two about creating suspense on the page, may have influenced Catton. Most of his books have chapters, but at least two don’t. King said he didn’t divide his dog-as-monster “Cujo” into chapters because he wanted it to feel as if it came at readers in a rush, like “a brick through a window.” There are breaks provided by spacing in “Cujo,” but King’s “Dolores Claiborne” lacks any kind of respite for readers, presumably because it’s meant to be one long outpouring, the title character confessing crimes to the police. (Virginia Woolf’s chapter-less “Mrs. Dalloway,” is also a stream-of-consciousness book.)

I think of chapters as a clue to readers. Writers use them to give us a hint of how much information we’ll need to take in at once and also how quickly they plan to proceed, something that’s especially important in the first few chapters, which can serve as a road map to reading the rest of the book.

That’s probably why Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” messes around not just with chapter length but with how much he puts in each chapter. Many pages are crammed with so much information (some of it literally sideways) that they’re difficult to process; other chapters contain just a couple of words. In both cases, that’s meant to convey something about the story, telling us when to race ahead and when to spend some time with a chapter.

So many of us readers hope to get lost in books, of course, but chapter divisions are a way for the author to intervene, to remind us of their presence.

In pretty much all of Marilynne Robinson’s books, what she wants us to do is linger. Her contemplative, every-detail-is-important novels want us to luxuriate in the moments, not to race to find out what happens. “Gilead,” for instance, has no chapters and her message is clear, both for the reader and for the person who’s living in this world: Slow. Down.

Have you noticed anything unusual about the chapters in the books you read? Let us know at books@startribune.com