College student Annie Pearson faults herself for her family’s death. Burdened by false guilt and hazy-minded, Annie befriends a dangerous enemy: Liza, an alien studying and harvesting human brains.
When Liza’s research reaches a turning point, she abducts Annie to her spaceship. There, multiple holographic grocery stores brim with other human test subjects sentenced to fight each other to the death. The aliens mistakenly believe that humanity’s natural habitat is the store and that war is our primary pastime. With their deadly coupon wargames, the aliens think they’ve created the perfect habitat.
Upon winning each Kroger fever dream gauntlet, customers graduate to a different fake store and a harder level of shopping. Those who win each level are told they’ll earn a ticket home.
But rare is the advertisement whose promises come true. Someone leads these wargames. Once Annie makes a name for herself as a leading contender in the Run, she graduates not to the next level but instead to the Run’s headquarters, where the smartest and most deadly Grocery Run fighters lead the show. In headquarters, death offers no discounts, and she must face the fact that her continued survival will cost her humanity come checkout.
Between the flame-throwers brandished by fellow captives and the infinite (yet sometimes poisonous) free samples, Annie engages in a shopping spree worse than a Y2K Black Friday. It’s a good thing she already has a kill count, because only the best customer can win the most cutthroat grocery run in the galaxy.
GROCERY RUN is my answer to Cato yelling Clove’s name during the feast scene in The Hunger Games. I grew up near Denver, where the Capital was in the story, and living where the villain does in her story, I feel that Collins’s tale revolves around more than the downtrodden. Should there be empathy for evil? What would the Games be like from the Career’s perspective? From the Gamemaker’s? My story is a retelling of Dante’s Inferno with aliens playing the part of demons and a main character whose Beatrice is the Devil. Think Ender's Game mashed with The Hunger Games, taking place at Trader Joe's. THE GROCERY RUN is a 99,000 word Adult Science Fiction. It is similar to how Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins is dark and self-deprecating, yet contains gossamer threads of sardonic humor to stitch the gore together.
I earned an English B.A. and I am also a first-year law student at *** with a penchant for baking, mountain trail-running 5K every day, and microscopically small dogs (who also like to run).
First 300 words:
“Your brain smells delicious, Annie. Let’s keep going.”
I nodded and threw the axe, landing it solidly in the center of the study room inside the library.
“Excellent,” clipped Liza, an alien researcher. Her eyes glowed a bright green as she scooped a handful of teeth from a bowl on her desk and ate them. The small kernels screamed while she chewed. “A few more reps, then my assistant will transport down to administer the last test.” Finally.
My light curls rustled against my cheeks. A soft breeze lazily stretched through the open window of the library. Reserved for the next hour, sufficient time for an alien cleanup crew to erase remnants of our session before any other university students interrupted. Late summer called to me with smells like hot dust, growing things, and barbecue. Shouts and laughter pealed from a party outside. It didn’t matter. Loud, though.
Liza flipped a notecard, eyeing me as I turned to face her again. Logic games.
“If God is love,” I stated, reading the card. I tried to breathe through my mouth because the wafts of tangy pork were otherwise distracting. “And love is blind, then what is God?” I thought about the question as I strode to retrieve my weapon. “God is blind.”
Liza nodded. “As a bat.” The games weren’t about sense—just cold knowledge, and I answered based on the frigidity provided and nothing else. “A few more,” she said, her voice slicing through my thoughts like a tortilla chip slipping through nacho cheese. She flipped another card as I yanked the axe from the target and retreated.
My throat tightened. “And then your assistant will—”
“Will test you and the outcome will permit transport to the starship,” she cut in. “Or preclude.” She waved the card, narrowing her eyes.
I know you say this book has "gossamer threads of sardonic humor," but that still suggests a lot less humor than the premise of this book, which is "ignorant aliens set up grocery store death matches that involve flamethrowing each other over coupons." And even if it's supposed to be some grim takedown of capitalism or whatever where the humor mainly stems from how outrageous it all is, your meditations on empathy for evil and Dante's Inferno don't mesh with how you keep making jokes in the actual query:
I don't know how seriously you want me to take this. Even boiling it down to the most basic of elements, "alien abductions" is a little absurd. "Alien abductions by aliens who don't understand humanity" is a little more absurd. "Alien abductions by aliens who don't understand humanity so they keep getting everyone killed" is absurd enough that any competent execution is going to default to at least a layer of comedy, significantly more than "gossamer threads" of snarkiness. And then you keep piling more on top of that. But then you're also reminding me that the main character thinks she's responsible for her family's deaths. It's like you've just interrupted someone's standup about the entitled customers who come into their day job to scream, "SO WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT THE GUN VIOLENCE EPIDEMIC?!"
Like, a major part of where both of those series get their emotional impact from is that the characters suffering are literal children. It's hard to wring the same automatic pathos from adults beating each other up in a fake grocery store because little green men said so.
First, it should be "Careers' perspective" and "Gamemakers' [perspective]." Second, the spelling is "Capitol" in those books. Third, I think you're spending a little too long talking about someone else's work. If you want to say, "[THE] [DEADLIEST] GROCERY RUN was inspired by reading The Hunger Games and wanting to delve further into the villains' psychologies," limit it to something that short.
It will help you if you have a couple comps that aren't part of major blockbuster franchises.
Did you mean "clicked"?
So, not really in a "slicing" manner at all?
I'm sorry if that was too harsh, but I hope it helps at all.
Thank you for your thoughts! I want to make sure I summarized them. Focusing on the notes on age, the premise may fit better if the characters' age range is younger? Can do, but I wanted to make sure that was what you were aiming for. As for the humor, I was hoping you might be able to clarify: Should I cut down on the humor, or explain that it's how the mc copes? That's shown later in the story, but it'd be great if the query could stand on its own two feet. Thanks again for the notes, they're very much appreciated.
No, what I meant was that your comparison to two series that are mostly very heavy falls flat because you don't convince us that this has the same weight. "Children killing and dying for stupid reasons" is depressing in pretty much every scenario, including in those books. "Adults killing and dying for stupid reasons" is not inherently funny, but there are many more works that try to do that in a funny way than works that try to do the same thing with children. This makes me think, when you're mashing together "adults killing and dying for stupid reasons" with something as silly as "alien grocery store simulator," that you're trying to go for comedy rather than tragedy.
Your scenario is ridiculous on its face, and then you keep throwing in lines that come off as jokes, refusing to let any potential dread for or worry about Annie settle in. If you want the agent/readers to take this seriously (and you seem to want that, based on the housekeeping), you need to dial back on the ridiculousness significantly. It's not that a dark comedy about people attacking each other over coupons can't work, it's that you haven't put in whatever it would take to make that tonally fit with an exploration of grief and redemption. I don't know what that would be, but what you have currently is confusing.
I do not think you should make the characters younger, because then the disconnect will be heightened even further. I think you should reevaluate the tone of this query and maybe of this manuscript. Or at the very least, take out the comparison to those two series.
Again, it depends on how you want this to come off. Do you want me to feel bad for Annie? Do you want me to laugh at Annie? Do you want me to cheer for her? Do you want me to get her therapy? Some combination? If you want this to be mostly straightfaced with the occasional gallows humor from Annie's narration, you could establishing it as part of her personality from the jump. Again, "I think I killed my entire family" is only depressing. "I'm a jokester whose entire family is dead" has the potential to be funny, at least.
Thanks for your reply! It's very much appreciated
Okay, so I agree with everything @Imaginary-Exit-2825 said but have some additional thoughts. This is one of those queries where I feel like there is almost too much focus on the world building and you lose sight of the character. Like the world is funny and cool but you talk about it more than you talk about Annie.
What does Annie want? What does winning the grocery run get her? More runs in these virtual grocery gauntlets? Why does she think her fault herself for her family's death? I need to know and care more about Annie for this query to really work.
This is a cool line "her continued survival will cost her humanity come checkout." but it doesn't tell me anything about the stakes for this book. It feels like its just going to be a series of chapters of Annie surviving grocery stores and not much else. Your book might be great but this query reads as a concept in search of a story.
I would cut almost everything in this paragraph. It's not selling your story. In fact, I think it does you a disservice. You shouldn't have to tell me your themes, they should be clear from the story portion. Your comps are too old and too big, you need something published in the last 3ish years.
Like the idea here is fun, but you are focusing on the wrong things for the query.
Thank you for your thoughts!! Very much appreciated
Hello!
I am one person with one opinion
I have to agree with the feedback that this feels a lot more than a smidge of humor. The entire query reads like absurdism. There is nothing wrong with absurdism and absurdist concepts can have deep themes.
The comps, however, are not helping. They are extremely old and in the wrong age category as both are YA (sometimes Ender's Game is called middle grade) and you're saying this is adult. Why didn't you comp Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan? It takes an absurdist concept and uses it to say something about colonization in the food industry. That seems way closer than the two dystopia-level concepts you have comped to
Good luck!
Thank you for your reply! I will absolutely make sure to take a look at Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan. Are there perchance any other books you think might work? No worries if not :)
Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente is an intergalactic Eurovision song contest that has a similar absurdist, Douglas Addams-y feeling. It’s from 2018 so possibly a bit too old.
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a contemporary adult sci fi with a death match set up and similar social commentary.
Can't think of any others. It would probably behoove you to look at publishers putting out sci-fi and look at their recent catalogues
A little confused about the Inferno line. The rest is interesting tho
Thanks! I'll take a look at that one and edit.
I like the premise! Trim the query letter by a line or two, but I felt like the flow was well done, overall.
Thank you!