Successful Queries: “Notes on Surviving the Fire,” by Christine Murphy

Welcome back to the Successful Queries series. In this installment, find a query letter for Christine Murphy’s debut novel, Notes on Surviving the Fire (Knopf).

Christine Murphy has lived, worked, and traveled in more than a hundred countries, including living for 11 months in a tent across the African continent and a year as a resident in a Buddhist nunnery in the Himalayas. A trained Buddhologist, Murphy has a Ph.D. in religious studies. This is her first novel.

Here’s Christine’s query:

Dear Catherine,

My novel, CARPET BOMB (100,000 words), is a literary mystery set in dark academia. It questions rape revenge narratives with the tone of Bunny and the grief of My Dark Vanessa. Your interest in literary and upmarket fiction makes me think we may be a good match.

Sarah Common is used to people not believing her. Most women are.

Only Nathan, her best friend and confidant, believes what happened at the house party, what happened when she went into the room in the back. Only Nathan believes she deserves revenge.

Then Nathan shows up dead and Sarah knows it was murder, but no one believes her. Again.

With six figures of student debt, Sarah needs to focus her energy on finding a professorship. She can’t risk her future by tracking Nathan’s killer, or indulging in revenge.

Even when she finds out her academic advisor is sabotaging her job prospects.

Even when she finds out Nathan isn’t the only young man killed on campus.

Even when she finds out all those fine, young men were accused of sexual assault. Including Nathan.

California wild fires move closer to campus. Smoke and ash fill the air. Faced with the possibility of a vigilante serial killer doing what she has always fantasized about, Sarah must decide if revenge can ever be sweet.

I have completed Grubstreet’s Novel Incubator and Novel Generator. Like Sarah, I have a PhD in a ridiculous subject and plenty of boring peer-reviewed publications. As per your request, I have attached the first 10,000 words of the manuscript and a synopsis. Please do reach out if you would like to see more.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Christine Murphy

Check out Christine Murphy’s Notes on Surviving the Fire here:

Bookshop | Amazon

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Christine’s thoughts on querying:

Having worked in positions where I was responsible for reviewing a high volume of incoming material, I empathize with agents facing a massive slush pile at the end of a busy workday. I prioritized:

• Low word count
• Lots of white space
• All details and requested formatting/contents were correct

Next, I thought about the tone of my book, the style in which it is written, and the feeling I strove to create in the book. I tried to mirror that in the query letter:

• Short, clipped sentences (much like the voice of my character)
• A sprinkling of “hooks” to draw the reader’s attention (it is a thriller after all)
• A building sense of dread or tension, such that the reader wants to find out what happens next.
• I queried “literary mystery” and “literary thriller” interchangeably, depending on what I thought an agent would respond to (I wasn’t sure which genre my book fit into).
• A friend recommended “dark academia” because it’s a fairly popular sub-genre. I hesitated to use it (I associate that phrase with YA writing), but I think it works as an atmospheric description.

My biggest challenge with this query was to balance an accurate representation of the novel’s subject matter with a true sense of its style. The subject is dark, but the tone is funny and irreverent.

• I made sure to remove agents from my query list who specified they did not read sexual violence.
• I settled on using “rape” once in the summary sentence, situating the novel as a rejection of conventional narratives. I did not want to hide the subject matter of the book, but I also did not want to reduce the entire story to a single plot element.
• I followed up the initial pitch with a clearly feminist statement (‘most women are’), to make clear the narrative lens (figuring this might weed out a few more agents).
• I included my PhD because it is relevant to the character and the world of higher education, and included the phrase “ridiculous subject…boring peer-reviewed articles” because it shows humor, and the book is funny!

I kept the description of myself short. My published-fiction writing background is minimal (if I had more to share, I would have). I kept the Catherine-specific sentence minimal too. We had never met, and no one was connecting me to her, so rather than make something up, I got straight to the point.

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