Query critique 4/20/23

Offer up your page (or query) for Nathan's critique on the blog.
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Nathan Bransford
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Joined: December 4th, 2009, 11:17 pm
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Query critique 4/20/23

Post by Nathan Bransford » April 17th, 2023, 3:59 pm

Want to see how your editing approach compares to mine?

Below is the query up for critique on the blog on Thursday. Feel free to chime in with comments, create your own redline (please note the "font colour" button above the posting box, which looks like a drop of ink), and otherwise offer feedback. When offering your feedback, please please remember to be polite and constructive. In order to leave a comment you will need to register an account in the Forums, which should be self-explanatory.

I'll be back with my own post on the blog and we'll literally be able to compare notes.

Dear {agent}:

The Old Monster, complete at 75k words, is a supernatural thriller with the heart of Fredrik Backman’s A Man called Ove meets Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box.

Isaac, a 93yo WW2 survivor, cannot hear children. It’s a type of selective hearing loss he’s had since the Great War. He considers a blessing. Yet when, following a seizure, Isaac meets Will, a newly orphaned 13yo at the local county hospital, he finds there’s more to his strange affliction than he suspected.

A ghost has been haunting the hospital for many years now, killing male patients via induced heart attacks. The ghost pounces on Isaac, transporting him back to 1941, to a time when he was a partisan fighting the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and into events leading up to a dark secret Isaac has been suppressing all his life, the murder of his infant daughter when Isaac was 14, and a curse that took children out of his life.

Inexplicably, Will travels alongside Isaac, into a body of an old peasant, a witness to those events. This also allows Isaac to hear the boy, both in the 1941 memories, and in the present. But as the ghost forces the two of them to relive Isaac’s crime, Will gets progressively sicker, leading Isaac to a dreadful realization: if he cannot finally face his traumatic past, the boy whose company he’s come to treasure will die.

Eugene Polonsky lives in Seattle with his wife, two boys, and a floppy-eared non-Beagle. His short stories have appeared in Reed Magazine, Armarolla Magazine, and Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

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