u/Efficient-Version237

Hi All,

I'm an aspiring non-professional writer working on my first ever novel draft. I'd love to get some general feedback on whether to keep or scrap this opening...I'm really struggling on how to create a "hook" for a more low-concept plot. I'm going for a murder mystery a la Agatha Christie books but with some darker thriller elements/social critique (i.e. American Psycho) thrown in.

*Apologies in advance, I know that my formatting isn't ideal (and I haven't had a full edit or beta read yet) but I'm not looking for word-level spelling/grammar/dialogue format notes.

I'd really appreciate opinions on whether the tone/style works (more maximalist, intentionally purple at times). Is the "voice" too much or too hard to follow? Is the narrator just too unlikabe to be a relatble hero? Is this kind of writing something that you would read or at least could see people wanting to read?

Thank you!

*Also, I'm really not tech savvy, so I'm just putting my writing sample below so I'm not missing pages.

------------------------------

A year following my first American murder, I found myself in the habit of wandering through flea markets. It wasn’t intentional, as I’d long held phobias of antique gimmicks and the cooler bobos who bought into them. Rather, like most unintentionally helpful practices I’d adopted in response to trauma, it came courtsey of my literary agent, Charna. 

After a rant on intellectual siloing of authoritarian publishers landed me in the Daily Mail under the description, “Campbell Grice-Hutchinson, former antifa economist”, Charna forced me into a weekly Saturday exile from my flat until the release of my debut in December, 2026. Still, according to her therapist, I wasn’t qualified to participate in Shabbat. So, we agreed, I should do some inner work on weekends by confronting my anxieties, beginning with millenial crowds.

Secretly, I wasn’t distressed at being torn from my writing desk, the private altar where I’d become too comfortable confessing my defects. I enjoyed dressing down as a good enough stranger in the publics’ eye, facing zero expectations for an afternoon at a time. And I certainly couldn’t write off the wholesomeness of satisfying a banal human urge to conspicuously consume without bludgeoning anyone to pulp.

Eventually, I even mustered confidence in my wanning disgust reflex to revisit childhood hellscapes around Hyde Park. I learned later that my Freudian subconscious was in search of the mother I’d ghosted since grifting The New Yorker readership with a third short story and moving back to London. But I never found Ida among stacks of no-money heirloom Levis and disease-blanket zines, and by mid-July, I was consciously bored enough of her memory to consider avoiding other expensive neighborhoods’ flightiest denizens.

Sooner than expected, summer’s dying rain compelled me to trigger myself with even drippier memories than my teenage not-quite-failures. On Charna’s therapist’s suggestion, I chose to make a weekly pilgrimage Portabello Road, the last stop of 2025 where I was certain I’d abandoned my pre-murder principles. Yet, on my first August Saturday, as I indulged myself, ambling through a twee street carnival, I was struck with an uncomfortably pleasant realization. I was no longer ashamed to be off edge. 

Fortunately, I was primed to notice, a few meters from my favorite pre-loved human teeth vendor, that a dystopian art gallery had supplanted the Bloomsburry coffee shop, where, 395 days ago, I’d said yes to a New York house-sitting gig on a whim. I decided, rollicking on the curb before the gallery’s door, that to fully expose myself to my bloody past, I ought to retrace my steps in it’s moved-on space. 

Still, I crept inside, more than a little lost without the self-flagellatory agenda I’d pushed the prior June. I’d have to accept that, since my last visit, I’d somehow aged out of tragiclownish martyrdom at haggard 36. Instead, like a mature adult narcissist, I was more interested in judging the outputs of bona fide artistes to mask insecurities of my creative hackiness as an ex-numbers guy. And, thank God, by some post-post-modern miracle, at least my ego’s baser needs were met that day.

Upon entry on the gallery’s ground floor, I came face-to-feet with a lifesize male dummy tethered to a hospital bed via pink liquid IV drip. He was conservatively titled La Mort De Pinko, whose love I could buy for the low price of 70,000 pounds. I was hooked.

 On a return trip to visit Pinko shooting up behind a glass cage in September, I had quite another ball sending my best-friend Tarak contraband screenshots of plastic brains in mason jars called Maternity Wards as proof of our nation’s cultural decline. But while these one-off joke pieces kept me snarky through early fall’s seasonal affective assault on my literary output, they palled in comparison to the upcoming farce that would launch a thousand copies of my novel.

 As usual, on a globally warm October Saturday, I was loafing around my prefered gallery room, nursing envy among technially-proficient bronze sculptures, when an unfamiliar docent waved me back to her corner. 

“Sir? Your brother just went to see the side piece.” She pointed her walker at the opaque double doors at the far end of the room that I’d never opened before.

 “Well, I appreciate the tip, but I don’t have a brother. I’m a one and only inspiriation behind a wonderful divorce so...”

My assailant smacked wrinkled lips on dentures, refusing to let me go in peace. “Huh. Odd. The man in there looks just like you. Think you two’ve even got the same trainers.”

I glanced at my generic white Converse reserved for anonymous days. “Okay, maybe we can work out some kind of art heist plot together.”

The docent shook her grey bob. I could see, she was desperate for my acknowledgement of how horrific it was that any poor boy had to look as lame as me. “Go on. Really, it’s uncanny. And you don’t have typical features.”

I didn’t want to know what she meant and I wasn’t in the mood to pop off at a grandmother, so I tossed her a quick “Thanks?” and followed her cue to the doors, prepared to have a good laugh with an equally unhandsome stranger.

Frankly, I didn’t know who or what to expect, so I planned to consume visuals as they stumbled into my line of sight. Inside the tiny black box show room, the first monstrosity that piqued my ire was the obnoxiously priced torture wall of plexiglass covered in rows of concave mirrored disks on both sides. Each disk was subtly warped so that you were forced to hate your mugshot as a disfigured blob repeatedly taunting you, Wharhol-style.

Without hesitation, I leered into a central disk to inspect a pimple on my chin, but immediately a curly-headed shadow in the bare strip of glass besides the neighboring disk struck me as bizzaire. I gaped into my blurred face, wondering how my pimple been reabsorbed into my skin so painlessly. And suddenly, remembering the docent’s comment, I peered down at my feet only to notice my Converse, slightly elongated and older, tapping at me from the other side of the wall.

“Jesus, damn it. Campbell? How long...are you dealing with like, amensia? Or face blindness...what’s that disease called again?”

Before I could cringe at the unfamiliar sound of my name, the speaker leaned closer to our crack, trangressing a very obvious, silver line of tape on the floor beaming up a “Don’t you dare cross me!” glare. And in a stroke of uncanny genetic similarity, he triggered a security alarm just as I would’ve, had I dared trip one milimeter closer to our shaggy browlines.

Aubrey Grice-Hutchinson welled up from behind the plexiglass. “Shall we make a run for it?”

I raised my voice as the alarm continued nagging us. “Depends, would you care to take me somewhere expensive? And no, I don’t have prosopagnosia.”

Aubrey sniffled. “Wherever you want to stop, I’m game...and a bit broke at the moment.”

“All right.” I cried too, mostly out of obligation, but Aubrey didn’t notice. He joined me, engulfing me in his sweatered arms, and together we hobbled into a lift and out the gallery’s front door before an army of geriatric docents could hijack the scene of our fraternal reunion. 

Outside, I was always a younger brother. I let Aubrey haul me away from the shuttering street flea, in exile from a receeding sun, past happy hour carnage left for gutters by anti-environmental socialites. We didn’t exchange words on our escape from Portabello’s civilized bedlam, but I could gage his growing confidence as he peddled backwards. 

Without meeting my hopeful gaze, he squinted through all my crevices and angles, as if I was a rival he’d want to eliminate or a suspect he’d only need to remember in sketchy detail. I didn’t feel strongly that I ought to look directly into any part of him, either.

Finally, when we reached a darkened tube station stairway, he jumped a full two steps down before abruptly halting and pivoting sideways. Unprepared for his fall, I stumbled towards him over a fish-scented floor mural, probably by his design.

“I’ll see you?” He gently pushed me up to standing on the bright sidewalk.

“You could come to my place for a little.” I wasn’t going to run from him. 

“You’re still alone? In that dingy studio?” At last, he sounded familiar.

“I mean, I have a new roommate, David. But he’s quiet.” This wasn’t untrue. Dr. David Okoduwa, a comp sci PhD, had taken up my mantle as the swottiest nerd Hermit of Kensington. His mother, like mine before her, had recently purchased my old studio and let me use the kitchen space as a week-day office for a nominal fee as long as I talked to David about women and the long-term side effects of academia.

“You’re happy?” Aubrey sounded nervous.

“Well, I’m not clinically depressed any longer, is that fine by you?”

“That’s uh...look, however you can keep living with yourself, keep making something of your life.”

“Okay...sure?” My vocal chords betrayed me, whisping up to a lisp. I’d prepped this reunion beat in a screenplay rewritten over months, and though my scenes always differed in setting and genre, never once had I imagined Aubrey would leave our conversation anything but the ass-tucked coward between us.

He knew I was frightened. “I just wanted you to know. Whatever the Hell happened, I’m not judging you, Ma’s not. She’s just gone unhinged since you left. She doesn’t understand why and I can’t be the one to tell her. We’re-“

 “Oh, that’s too kind of you, choosing to forgive me after all I haven’t done.” I tongued a small victory lap around my dry mouth as Aubrey lowered himself another step to pull his final ace at a safe distance from me. 

He whispered like our divorced father. “No, I’m saying we don’t care what happened. As long as you’re well, you’ve moved on...but we’re not happy without you. We miss you.”  

I assumed he was lying, because we shared the genetic blushy poker grin for a tell that our grandfather used to call our family’s funeral smile. “But you haven’t stopped beaming at me. It’s extremely creepy...almost pathologically sadistic. And in fact, I think you’re stalking me, you might even be kidnapping me in another minute.”

Aubrey reached up to me. “Campbell, I...God, or yes? We’ve been looking for you, but-”

Thankfully, my ringtone suddenly shouted Aubrey into silence and I was able to live out my fantasy of dumping a “Hello, darling!” straight down his gobsmacked, ovular gullet. 

His whole torso seized with the possibility that I might be loved, while I basked in a five minute phone call with my American editor, Juan, and his husband, Rich, who was designing my novel’s cover.

When I hung up, Aubrey sniffled again and muttered, “Can’t be.”

“Sorry, I should go.” I cooed at the pittbull leashed to a nearby lamp post.

“Wait...wait? You’ve got a book?”

I took Aubrey’s bait. “No thanks, I’m bored of waiting.” 

Part of me wished I could’ve left him stunned with that line and force fed him a purgatorial binary that he’d never be able to settle. I’d watch him submit to the illusion of having a free choice to look up at me or down at the grimy tube pit, knowing that he’d always be a co-dependent to his pride, and that whichever non-choice his ego made for him, he’d never escape the smiling shadow off my back. 

But apparently, I didn’t have the anger reserves left to push him down further. I waited for his response, and at length, he met my gaze and said,  “Hey! I saw that piece in the New Yorker, Brooklyn, whatever magazine. The FBI shot the little monster, did they? And now you’re the only one left alive who has to start over?”

“Why, you don’t think I deserve to?” I sniffled, forever a co-dependent to my shame.

“Of course you do! We all deserve redemption. Come here. We’ll go home and see Ma?”

I grinned back at him. There was the glimpse into his reality I’d craved for years. He needed me to be guilty of some forgivable crime so that he could rescue me and absolve his own guilt, just as I needed him to be saddistic so that I could triumphantly damn him and cower off as his victim. It occurred to me that we’d only ever wanted to acknowledge each other through the distorted plexiglass of our selfish animal needs, so that even if we stumbled over the silver line into one another’s intellectual pysche, we’d never inhabbit one human soul without triggering alarms. 

“Okay.” I skittled back down into the tube station and slung a tepid arm around Aubrey. We hugged again, this time long enough to express our growing forgiveness of the flesh brother we’d met for the first time in Pinko’s gallery.

I knew I was ready, that night, to admit to Aubrey and Ida, that I was still grappling with guilt. I’d confessed to my failure at my desk one too many times. And I would soon confess again, fictionally, but no less explicitly, in my novel, to strangers who’d pay me for the illusion of getting to decide. Did I deserve redemption?

Hi All,

I'm an aspiring non-professional writer working on my first ever novel draft. I'd love to get some general feedback on whether to keep or scrap this opening...I'm really struggling on how to create a "hook" for a more low-concept plot. I'm going for a murder mystery a la Agatha Christie books but with some darker thriller elements/social critique (i.e. American Psycho) thrown in.

*Apologies in advance, I know that my formatting isn't ideal (and I haven't had a full edit or beta read yet) but I'm not looking for word-level spelling/grammar/dialogue format notes.

I'd really appreciate opinions on whether the tone/style works (more maximalist, intentionally purple at times). Is the "voice" too much or too hard to follow? Is the narrator just too unlikabe to be a relatble hero? Is this kind of writing something that you would read or at least could see people wanting to read?

Thank you!

*Also, I'm really not tech savvy, so I'm just putting my writing sample below so I'm not missing pages.

------------------------------

A year following my first American murder, I found myself in the habit of wandering through flea markets. It wasn’t intentional, as I’d long held phobias of antique gimmicks and the cooler bobos who bought into them. Rather, like most unintentionally helpful practices I’d adopted in response to trauma, it came courtsey of my literary agent, Charna. 

After a rant on intellectual siloing of authoritarian publishers landed me in the Daily Mail under the description, “Campbell Grice-Hutchinson, former antifa economist”, Charna forced me into a weekly Saturday exile from my flat until the release of my debut in December, 2026. Still, according to her therapist, I wasn’t qualified to participate in Shabbat. So, we agreed, I should do some inner work on weekends by confronting my anxieties, beginning with millenial crowds.

Secretly, I wasn’t distressed at being torn from my writing desk, the private altar where I’d become too comfortable confessing my defects. I enjoyed dressing down as a good enough stranger in the publics’ eye, facing zero expectations for an afternoon at a time. And I certainly couldn’t write off the wholesomeness of satisfying a banal human urge to conspicuously consume without bludgeoning anyone to pulp.

Eventually, I even mustered confidence in my wanning disgust reflex to revisit childhood hellscapes around Hyde Park. I learned later that my Freudian subconscious was in search of the mother I’d ghosted since grifting The New Yorker readership with a third short story and moving back to London. But I never found Ida among stacks of no-money heirloom Levis and disease-blanket zines, and by mid-July, I was consciously bored enough of her memory to consider avoiding other expensive neighborhoods’ flightiest denizens.

Sooner than expected, summer’s dying rain compelled me to trigger myself with even drippier memories than my teenage not-quite-failures. On Charna’s therapist’s suggestion, I chose to make a weekly pilgrimage Portabello Road, the last stop of 2025 where I was certain I’d abandoned my pre-murder principles. Yet, on my first August Saturday, as I indulged myself, ambling through a twee street carnival, I was struck with an uncomfortably pleasant realization. I was no longer ashamed to be off edge. 

Fortunately, I was primed to notice, a few meters from my favorite pre-loved human teeth vendor, that a dystopian art gallery had supplanted the Bloomsburry coffee shop, where, 395 days ago, I’d said yes to a New York house-sitting gig on a whim. I decided, rollicking on the curb before the gallery’s door, that to fully expose myself to my bloody past, I ought to retrace my steps in it’s moved-on space. 

Still, I crept inside, more than a little lost without the self-flagellatory agenda I’d pushed the prior June. I’d have to accept that, since my last visit, I’d somehow aged out of tragiclownish martyrdom at haggard 36. Instead, like a mature adult narcissist, I was more interested in judging the outputs of bona fide artistes to mask insecurities of my creative hackiness as an ex-numbers guy. And, thank God, by some post-post-modern miracle, at least my ego’s baser needs were met that day.

Upon entry on the gallery’s ground floor, I came face-to-feet with a lifesize male dummy tethered to a hospital bed via pink liquid IV drip. He was conservatively titled La Mort De Pinko, whose love I could buy for the low price of 70,000 pounds. I was hooked.

 On a return trip to visit Pinko shooting up behind a glass cage in September, I had quite another ball sending my best-friend Tarak contraband screenshots of plastic brains in mason jars called Maternity Wards as proof of our nation’s cultural decline. But while these one-off joke pieces kept me snarky through early fall’s seasonal affective assault on my literary output, they palled in comparison to the upcoming farce that would launch a thousand copies of my novel.

 As usual, on a globally warm October Saturday, I was loafing around my prefered gallery room, nursing envy among technially-proficient bronze sculptures, when an unfamiliar docent waved me back to her corner. 

“Sir? Your brother just went to see the side piece.” She pointed her walker at the opaque double doors at the far end of the room that I’d never opened before.

 “Well, I appreciate the tip, but I don’t have a brother. I’m a one and only inspiriation behind a wonderful divorce so...”

My assailant smacked wrinkled lips on dentures, refusing to let me go in peace. “Huh. Odd. The man in there looks just like you. Think you two’ve even got the same trainers.”

I glanced at my generic white Converse reserved for anonymous days. “Okay, maybe we can work out some kind of art heist plot together.”

The docent shook her grey bob. I could see, she was desperate for my acknowledgement of how horrific it was that any poor boy had to look as lame as me. “Go on. Really, it’s uncanny. And you don’t have typical features.”

I didn’t want to know what she meant and I wasn’t in the mood to pop off at a grandmother, so I tossed her a quick “Thanks?” and followed her cue to the doors, prepared to have a good laugh with an equally unhandsome stranger.

Frankly, I didn’t know who or what to expect, so I planned to consume visuals as they stumbled into my line of sight. Inside the tiny black box show room, the first monstrosity that piqued my ire was the obnoxiously priced torture wall of plexiglass covered in rows of concave mirrored disks on both sides. Each disk was subtly warped so that you were forced to hate your mugshot as a disfigured blob repeatedly taunting you, Wharhol-style.

Without hesitation, I leered into a central disk to inspect a pimple on my chin, but immediately a curly-headed shadow in the bare strip of glass besides the neighboring disk struck me as bizzaire. I gaped into my blurred face, wondering how my pimple been reabsorbed into my skin so painlessly. And suddenly, remembering the docent’s comment, I peered down at my feet only to notice my Converse, slightly elongated and older, tapping at me from the other side of the wall.

“Jesus, damn it. Campbell? How long...are you dealing with like, amensia? Or face blindness...what’s that disease called again?”

Before I could cringe at the unfamiliar sound of my name, the speaker leaned closer to our crack, trangressing a very obvious, silver line of tape on the floor beaming up a “Don’t you dare cross me!” glare. And in a stroke of uncanny genetic similarity, he triggered a security alarm just as I would’ve, had I dared trip one milimeter closer to our shaggy browlines.

Aubrey Grice-Hutchinson welled up from behind the plexiglass. “Shall we make a run for it?”

I raised my voice as the alarm continued nagging us. “Depends, would you care to take me somewhere expensive? And no, I don’t have prosopagnosia.”

Aubrey sniffled. “Wherever you want to stop, I’m game...and a bit broke at the moment.”

“All right.” I cried too, mostly out of obligation, but Aubrey didn’t notice. He joined me, engulfing me in his sweatered arms, and together we hobbled into a lift and out the gallery’s front door before an army of geriatric docents could hijack the scene of our fraternal reunion. 

Outside, I was always a younger brother. I let Aubrey haul me away from the shuttering street flea, in exile from a receeding sun, past happy hour carnage left for gutters by anti-environmental socialites. We didn’t exchange words on our escape from Portabello’s civilized bedlam, but I could gage his growing confidence as he peddled backwards. 

Without meeting my hopeful gaze, he squinted through all my crevices and angles, as if I was a rival he’d want to eliminate or a suspect he’d only need to remember in sketchy detail. I didn’t feel strongly that I ought to look directly into any part of him, either.

Finally, when we reached a darkened tube station stairway, he jumped a full two steps down before abruptly halting and pivoting sideways. Unprepared for his fall, I stumbled towards him over a fish-scented floor mural, probably by his design.

“I’ll see you?” He gently pushed me up to standing on the bright sidewalk.

“You could come to my place for a little.” I wasn’t going to run from him. 

“You’re still alone? In that dingy studio?” At last, he sounded familiar.

“I mean, I have a new roommate, David. But he’s quiet.” This wasn’t untrue. Dr. David Okoduwa, a comp sci PhD, had taken up my mantle as the swottiest nerd Hermit of Kensington. His mother, like mine before her, had recently purchased my old studio and let me use the kitchen space as a week-day office for a nominal fee as long as I talked to David about women and the long-term side effects of academia.

“You’re happy?” Aubrey sounded nervous.

“Well, I’m not clinically depressed any longer, is that fine by you?”

“That’s uh...look, however you can keep living with yourself, keep making something of your life.”

“Okay...sure?” My vocal chords betrayed me, whisping up to a lisp. I’d prepped this reunion beat in a screenplay rewritten over months, and though my scenes always differed in setting and genre, never once had I imagined Aubrey would leave our conversation anything but the ass-tucked coward between us.

He knew I was frightened. “I just wanted you to know. Whatever the Hell happened, I’m not judging you, Ma’s not. She’s just gone unhinged since you left. She doesn’t understand why and I can’t be the one to tell her. We’re-“

 “Oh, that’s too kind of you, choosing to forgive me after all I haven’t done.” I tongued a small victory lap around my dry mouth as Aubrey lowered himself another step to pull his final ace at a safe distance from me. 

He whispered like our divorced father. “No, I’m saying we don’t care what happened. As long as you’re well, you’ve moved on...but we’re not happy without you. We miss you.”  

I assumed he was lying, because we shared the genetic blushy poker grin for a tell that our grandfather used to call our family’s funeral smile. “But you haven’t stopped beaming at me. It’s extremely creepy...almost pathologically sadistic. And in fact, I think you’re stalking me, you might even be kidnapping me in another minute.”

Aubrey reached up to me. “Campbell, I...God, or yes? We’ve been looking for you, but-”

Thankfully, my ringtone suddenly shouted Aubrey into silence and I was able to live out my fantasy of dumping a “Hello, darling!” straight down his gobsmacked, ovular gullet. 

His whole torso seized with the possibility that I might be loved, while I basked in a five minute phone call with my American editor, Juan, and his husband, Rich, who was designing my novel’s cover.

When I hung up, Aubrey sniffled again and muttered, “Can’t be.”

“Sorry, I should go.” I cooed at the pittbull leashed to a nearby lamp post.

“Wait...wait? You’ve got a book?”

I took Aubrey’s bait. “No thanks, I’m bored of waiting.” 

Part of me wished I could’ve left him stunned with that line and force fed him a purgatorial binary that he’d never be able to settle. I’d watch him submit to the illusion of having a free choice to look up at me or down at the grimy tube pit, knowing that he’d always be a co-dependent to his pride, and that whichever non-choice his ego made for him, he’d never escape the smiling shadow off my back. 

But apparently, I didn’t have the anger reserves left to push him down further. I waited for his response, and at length, he met my gaze and said,  “Hey! I saw that piece in the New Yorker, Brooklyn, whatever magazine. The FBI shot the little monster, did they? And now you’re the only one left alive who has to start over?”

“Why, you don’t think I deserve to?” I sniffled, forever a co-dependent to my shame.

“Of course you do! We all deserve redemption. Come here. We’ll go home and see Ma?”

I grinned back at him. There was the glimpse into his reality I’d craved for years. He needed me to be guilty of some forgivable crime so that he could rescue me and absolve his own guilt, just as I needed him to be saddistic so that I could triumphantly damn him and cower off as his victim. It occurred to me that we’d only ever wanted to acknowledge each other through the distorted plexiglass of our selfish animal needs, so that even if we stumbled over the silver line into one another’s intellectual pysche, we’d never inhabbit one human soul without triggering alarms. 

“Okay.” I skittled back down into the tube station and slung a tepid arm around Aubrey. We hugged again, this time long enough to express our growing forgiveness of the flesh brother we’d met for the first time in Pinko’s gallery.

I knew I was ready, that night, to admit to Aubrey and Ida, that I was still grappling with guilt. I’d confessed to my failure at my desk one too many times. And I would soon confess again, fictionally, but no less explicitly, in my novel, to strangers who’d pay me for the illusion of getting to decide. Did I deserve redemption?