[QCrit] Adult Horror - YOUR EYES ARE OPEN WOUNDS (82k/Attempt 1)
Long time lurker and first time poster, and it's a bit terrifying, so please be kind!
Dear Agent,
I am very excited to share with you my multi-POV Southern gothic horror novel, YOUR EYES ARE OPEN WOUNDS, complete at 82,000 words. It will appeal to fans of Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix, The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer, Sundial by Catriona Ward, and Just Like Mother by Anne Hetzel, steeped in the eerie mysticism of the song Season of the Witch by Donovan.
Margot has spent decades building a life for herself as an author in Los Angeles, far from the abuse she endured at the hands of her mother, Iris. Then her younger sister, Wendy, calls with the news Margot has been waiting twenty-five years to hear: Iris is dying.
Returning to her childhood home in rural Louisiana, Margot plans to stay just long enough to make sure Iris is truly gone, and, if possible, repair her fractured relationship with her estranged sister, who remembers a very different mother – one who wasn’t brainwashed by a violent cult.
But when Wendy’s children, Max and Emma, move into Iris’s house, they begin behaving strangely. They are seeing things, hearing footsteps, and are visited by a terrifying man covered in bees. As Margot begins recognizing unsettling parallels between their experiences and the fragments she remembers from the cult, she is forced to dig into the trauma she has spent decades trying to bury. If nothing else, the truth might be enough to reignite her declining career.
But Iris’s death is only the beginning. As the children’s experiences grow darker and Emma begins displaying impossible abilities, Margot is forced to confront the truth she has spent her life denying: whatever followed her out of that cult has never let her go. The horror didn’t end when she escaped, and if Margot can’t stop it now, the cult is coming for the children.
[Bio/sign off]
FIRST 300
CHAPTER 1 - Margot
Every morning, my first thought was always the same: will today be the day my mother finally dies? It consumed me. I would think about it while I got my oil changed. While I did my taxes. While I looked into the eyes of the man I loved.
Soft rain pattered against the window – the first time we had rain in Los Angeles in almost a month. The sun lifted itself out of the ocean, spilling gold across the water all the way to shore. The world felt suspended in that in-between moment, where the street lights were turning off as bedroom lights were flicking on. People starting their day. Jogging, making smoothies, walking their dogs.
Imagining their mother’s death.
“So you see the problem, right, Margot?” Joanna, my agent, crackled through the phone. It was eight a.m. in New York, but she knew I’d be awake. Still awake.
“Sorry?” I replied. The knuckles on my left hand bloomed white as I gripped my pen, clicking it open and shut in a pattern that soothed me.
“You haven’t earned out your last two advances. The publisher is hesitant about picking up your option,” she said with all the tact of a battering ram “Please tell me you have something I can show them that will change their mind.”
I spun my chair back and forth, slowly, still staring out the window. The rain had picked up, so the glittering expanse of the city at dawn had been reduced to tiny pixels.
Click. Click. Click.
“And for the love of Christ, can you stop clicking that pen?” she huffed.
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Jo.”
“I want you to say you have pages to send me.”
“I just need a bit more time,” I replied.