[QCrit] GRAVE DIRT / Upmarket / 75k / 5th Attempt

I couldn't help myself. I tweaked the letter again, desperately trying to find the balance between voice, clarity, and word count. This version is at 395 words. I also adjusted my genre. I think Upmarket seems to match the overall plot a little better. I also added my first 300 words. Please let me know what you think and thank you to everyone who has offered advice so far!

First Attempt Second Attempt Third Attempt Fourth Attempt

Dear ____,

GRAVE DIRT is a Southern Upmarket novel, complete at 73,000 words. Based on your interest in [insert personalization]. Fans of Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing will appreciate hints towards the supernatural, and fans of Memphis by Tara Stringfellow will appreciate the rich sense of place. 

Beau Delisle is no stranger to getting his hands dirty to achieve what he wants. After losing his high school sweetheart, April, to a gulf coast blue blood, Beau spirals. Employing voodoo practices he picked up from a kooky neighbor as a child, Beau calls on the spirits to help him achieve the only thing he believes will win April back—becoming the richest man in Alabama. 

Beau’s small town liquor store flourishes, and he expands it into a regional empire. Never one to turn away a friend, or a dollar, Beau agrees to use the stores as a front for a lucrative drug smuggling operation run by a tenacious shrimper who’s gone bust. Making money both above and under the table, and newly awash in opulence, Beau moves into the same illustrious Birmingham neighborhood as April. With the spirits surely on his side, Beau keeps his mansion staffed, his clothes pressed, and the money flowing. 

After years of marriage to a man she was sure would never bore her, and lured by Beau’s ceaseless devotion, April fans the flames of Beau’s affections. Beau thinks he may easily succeed at sweeping April off her feet until April’s husband, Rex, uncovers Beau’s smuggling business.

Rex threatens to use his connections to turn Beau in, forcing Beau to comply with Rex’s demands to be his new supplier. Rex thinks he has both Beau and April under his thumb, so when he learns of their rekindled relationship, he detests his loss of control. Rex hatches a vengeful plan to take Beau’s businesses out from under him, along with putting a stop to Beau and April’s adultery. 

With the threat of losing both his income source and April looming, Beau will do anything to keep his business, and the woman he can’t live without, from slipping through his fingers again. 

Told between dual timelines of Beau’s youth in Mobile and present day Birmingham, Beau’s Gatsby-esque lifestyle offers a speculative twist on a familiar story. 

I am currently a high school science teacher living in Birmingham, Alabama. The full manuscript is available at your request. 

First 300:

White candles are for doing good. Black candles are for doing evil. Beau Delisle had done his fair share of both, but he figured he likely had company. 

Lighting yellow candles can bring about wealth. Between the ivy covered mansion at his back, the white vested staff, and the rolling lawn in front of him, it would seem that Beau Delisle had burned a lot of fucking yellow candles. 

The prim clink of crystal glasses may as well have been the cocking of a gun, for how it raised the hairs on the back of his neck just the same. Although, maybe it wasn’t the sound of the glass, but the blinding white teeth and reptilian eyes of the man across from him. Toasting with Rex felt like making a deal with the devil, trading a little piece of himself in exchange for saving face. Rex’s slinking arm wrapped around April’s waist, clutching her to him like a dragon its horde. She looked straight ahead, wide eyed and grinning, her cherry blossom pink nails resting primly on a champagne flute. He had the sensation that she was looking through him rather than at him. He wondered if it was the result of Rex’s suckered tentacle, too much to drink, or just who she had become. More Faberge egg than woman. 

Rex continued talking, but the mosquito scratch of his voice faded into the background. April blinked. Her long, dark lashes brushed the delicate skin just below her eyes before fluttering up again. Her lips dropped their smile for the briefest instant before settling back into her ever-present simper, like a painting whose expression can never change. Protruding collarbones sliced across her chest. A little too prominent for his liking. He thought to himself that she mustn’t have been eating enough. He looked into the robin’s egg blue of her eyes for signs of distress, unquiet, unhappiness, but was met with nothing. Like looking into the flat vacancy of a cloudless blue sky.