The Luminous Dead
BY caitlin starlingharper voyager2019Query Letter
Lethe is my first original novel, a 91,000 word claustrophobic young adult sci-fi/horror story with strong action elements. It juxtaposes physical adventure and danger against an intimate relationship between two under-pressure teenage girls, Gyre Price and Em Arasgain. The majority of the novel takes place in a single large cave system, and while Gyre and Em refer to other characters, sometimes see videos of other characters, and encounter strange creatures, Gyre and Em can only speak with each other as they deal with trauma, grief, guilt, privacy, trust, and autonomy.
Gyre Price lives on a poor, economically exploited colony world. Her mother abandoned her family when she was a girl, and now, at sixteen years old, her only chance of a half-decent life is beneath a kilometer of rock, hired by a mysterious employer to map a deadly cave while dodging the local fauna: a giant beast known locally as the Tunneler. Her only link to the surface, to any other human, is a radio comm to her employer, the enigmatic Em. Em has agreed to pay her ten times the going rate for the work, enough to get Gyre off the planet and on her mother's trail. The catch? Where Gyre would normally have a team of skilled professionals helping her, she has only Em, and Em has secrets and traumas of her own, traumas that go as deep as the tunnels Gyre is squirming through. And Em has full control of Gyre’s life for the duration of the job, by contract. If she wanted to, she could simply lock Gyre's suit in place and leave her to die.
Isolated and angry, surrounded by the constant threat of disaster (a tunnel collapse, a gear malfunction, or the last caches of supplies running dry), Gyre finds out more than she ever wanted to know about Em's life. Her cold, unfeeling handler is barely older than she is, and has grown up chasing the ghosts of her parents down to where her father died years before, and her mother returned to in her grief. She's driven, hyper focused, and reflexively self-reliant, but Gyre recognizes the fear and pain - pain Gyre knows very, very well.
Through it all, Gyre has the sinking feeling that she's being watched. Followed. She's not alone. And when they finally reach the bottom of the cave so that Em can say goodbye to her father's memory, they find that they're not the only ones down there. The Tunneler and the cave are the least of their worries.
They find living, breathing, screaming ghosts ready to chase them back to the surface.
About
Age Range
Adult
Genre
Horror
Word Count
110,000
Book Link
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-luminous-dead-caitlin-starling
Agent
Caitlin McDonald
Query Stats
Year Queried
2016
Number of Queries Sent
~30
Number of Full Requests Received
~5
Number of Offers of Representation
2
Number of Months Spent Querying This Novel
14 months
Years Spent Writing Before Getting an Offer
8
Number of Manuscripts Queried Before This One
0
Publication Status of The Book Queried
Published (Big 5)
Years Spent Writing Before This Book was Published
10-11, though not all years were active
Note to Querying Writers:
If I had to do it again, I would have tightened the query a little more and figured out comp titles to include (in fact, in later querying rounds while waiting for the two agents who eventually offered to read the full manuscript, I did play with title and comps). Also, although I queried as YA, I decided during calls with the two agents who offered that I would prefer to shop it as adult (which was actually how I'd originally written it; the YA lens slipped in during revisions). Both were very supportive and talked me through the pros and cons of each option. One independently recommended switching to adult on our first call.