[QCrit] Adult Horror HEINOUSLY YOURS (79k)
I´ve had multiple people look at this query before, but I feel like It´s not yet where I need it to be. I know it´s a niche book to sell in age/themes, so maybe the rejections are from that, but i´d like to have the query as strong as i can, anyway. edit: this is the third version, i can't change the title.
Any thoughts appreciated!
Dear (agent),
Since you expressed interest in (personalization), I thought you would be a good fit for HEINOUSLY YOURS, my adult speculative horror completed at 79k words. The manuscript deals with gender dysphoria in a surrealist manner and combines the theme of toxic relationships in Eric LaRocca's Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke with the psychedelic imagery and edgy youth culture of B. R. Yeager's Negative Space.
Jude only needs one friend. Doris is it.
First bonding over being the only trans students at their bigoted high school, the duo escaped to a grubby apartment in the city of twenty-first-century hippies, where they now enjoy a penniless yet lively adolescence. The soft-spoken Jude doesn't dream of anything beyond Doris's dazzling, furious company. To know that they are needed is enough for them.
Doris, however, holds the life-sized ambition of taking the fashion world by storm. She doesn't want to need Jude, yet whenever she caves under the pressure of her grueling fashion course, they receive her with open arms— almost as if they'd been praying on her downfall. But then, when Doris's course penalizes her for another screw-up, it isn't Jude who jumps in, but Elias: a mellow slacker who blunders through life with ditzy charm.
Ignoring Jude's quiet jealousy, Doris decides that a second friend can't hurt, but when she and Elias cross the blurry line between friends and lovers, reality starts to rot for both of them. Doris's bathroom mirror warps her reflection into dysphoric caricatures, Elias is haunted by visions of his deadbeat mother, and after the shared struggle brings them closer, the hallucinations grow even more volatile, prying at their scars with malicious delight. Frightened and confused, Doris commits to digging up the root of their haunting, but as she uncovers an unnerving link between Jude and Elias's pasts, she must reevaluate a friendship that has festered into something tumorous—before the madness consumes her and Elias, bones and all.
I am currently studying Fine Art at the (school) in (city), where my expression also skews towards the strange and the macabre. Having lived through the intimate terrors of transgender adolescence myself, I seek to paint a sharp, compassionate portrait of a community that is rarely granted the nuance it deserves.
Thank you for your time and consideration,
(Name Lastname)