[Qcrit] S.H.U.G.A.R. HIGH - New Adult / Adult - 125,000 words - V7.5
Is my Query acceptable?
Dear (),
Your dedication to championing debut novelists aligns perfectly with my career goals. I am thrilled to pitch S.H.U.G.A.R. HIGH, an upmarket horror novel complete at 125,000 words. The manuscript balances the visceral social critique of Agustina Bazterrica’s TENDER IS THE FLESH with the corporate apocalyptic dread of Ling Ma’s SEVERANCE.
Most apocalyptic stories follow the scrappy underdog who learns to fight. S.H.U.G.A.R. HIGH follows the daughter of the man who owns all of America's Safe Havens.
Harper Hale was raised on her father’s black card and his massive sugar empire. She has never gone without, and she has never looked at the machinery keeping her warm while the world starves fifteen feet from her door.
Three years into a viral apocalypse her father helped contain, Harper is exiled from her brick house to a perimeter tent, pruned as a liability the moment her father leaves the wall. When that wall falls in a single night, she faces a two-hundred-mile trek through an infected country to the Nevada Haven, surviving with no weapon, a group keeping her alive only as a keycard, and the dead refusing to stay quiet.
As Harper crosses the wasteland, survival horror gives way to something more political and intimate: a scientist who calculates the odds on her life out loud, a silent survivor carrying a folder that turns her family's fortune into a confession, a national policy of disappearance dressed as public health. The further Harper walks, the less the apocalypse resembles a collapse of civilization and the more it resembles its logical conclusion.
And the most dangerous voice in the book is the one only Harper can hear.
S.H.U.G.A.R. HIGH is my debut novel. I also have multiple completed manuscripts and am actively building a long-term career in speculative horror fiction.
Thank you for your time and consideration!