I hate comps. More than queries, more than synopses, I hate comps.
Book comps are other works (ideally books or authors, but movies or tv shows are ok) that compare in tone/genre/theme to your manuscript. These are those “x meets y in z” descriptions that demonstrate you know your genre and suggest an already-existing audience for your book.
In an effort to spruce up my query for RevPit I tried to come up with a few for “Fool’s Gold”. I didn’t find anything I thought suitable.
Half the reason I wrote the book was that I couldn’t find anything else like it. It’s the story of a man who discovers he can’t trust his own perceptions and how much he’s willing to overlook that if the voices in his head feed his ambitions. The overarching theme is the subjectivity of experience itself. This doesn’t compress neatly into an elevator pitch.
The best fit is gothic horror, but it’s missing a lot of the tropes: no haunted houses or monsters, no damsels in distress. Supernatural activity aplenty, but it might be all in Edward Kelley’s mind. So Dracula, Frankenstein, Haunting of Hill House, etc. aren’t good comps.
Bits of some books might work: the ghost (or not) of The Lost History of Dreams, the unexplained omniscience of the miniaturist in The Miniaturist, the “supernatural or fraud?” of Affinity (minus the resolution), the eastern European travels of The Historian. But the closest thematic comparison I’ve found is a movie.
The VVitch is a psychological horror movie in which it’s never clear whether a Puritan family is being terrorized by a witch or by their own fears. I loved this movie! Coincidentally* it has a number of things in common with Fool’s Gold: the subjectivity of reality: check, speaking in tongues, check, religious paranoia, check, inappropriate lust objects, check. I don’t have an evil goat in my book, but one can’t have everything.
A few elements of A Beautiful Mind work: science, math, and a man obeying the voices in his head (though Kelley never gets a formal diagnosis).
Soo….I guess my novel is “The VVitch meets A Beautiful Mind, but with alchemy” (but the comps are movies so do they still count?)?
Seriously, if you know of any novels with slippery realities tell me because I am here for that…and might be able to use them in my elevator pitch.
*And it is a coincidence – I started writing my novel before the movie came out.
Hmmm … I would have thought “The Haunting of Hill House” would work just because it’s left up in the air whether the events are caused by a ghost, by Eleanor (physically or psychically), or is all just everybody’s heightened imaginations (and Eleanor’s lies). But you know your novel better than I do.
I know you’ll have already checked whether the movies are based on or inspired by books.
There’s something about your description that’s pinging something in my brain. Let me get the groceries put away, then I’ll poke through my personal library catalogue.
Want to play with Library of Congress genre headings? There are assigned in cataloguing as searchable terms that define what a work is versus what it’s about. Based on your description I’d assign the following headings to your novel:
Historical fiction.
Biographical fiction.
Psychological fiction.
Gothic fiction.
You can search these headings and read their definitions here: http://id.loc.gov/search/?q=cs:http://id.loc.gov/authorities/genreForms
Or throw me other words that you feel describe your novel and I’ll be happy to hunt down and give you the appropriate genre heading (since I know how the system works and how to navigate it). Not all libraries use these in their catalogues but they are the best method for finding “books like this” once you know the official wording to use.
Identified the brain ping! (or one at least) “The Vampires of Atlantis” by Brian M. Stableford. It’s a novel-length expansion of the title story in his “Sheena and Other Gothic Tales” anthology (so you can read that to get the gist rather than commit to the novel). It’s modern setting but definitely in the slippery reality category (a young woman who believes she lived a past life in Atlantis and halfway convinces her sceptical boyfriend that this is true via various meditions and other means)
I’ll let you know if I find more
Hi. Thanks for commenting!
I shied away from “Hill House” because the haunting (or not) seems centered around the house, rather than the person – nothing odd happens with Eleanor until she enters Hill House.
The two movies I mention are based on non-fiction books: 17th century witchcraft trial transcripts (so dedicated was the director to historical accuracy that the script lifts direct quotes from the original accounts) and a biography of John Nash, respectively. And I’m not sure non-fiction in any media would count as a “comp” in the way I describe above.
Thank you. These I will check! You shouldn’t have to do the work of tracking down comps for me 😛
Thanks for the rec! Found it, and will let you know what I think once I read a bit. Thanks!
Gotcha. Though Eleanor does hint that she’s had odd things happen before coming to Hill House; specifically mentions a rain of stones she supposedly caused during her childhood. These are supposedly why she was part of the Hill House group.
Oh no, you know your book best so you’re the one who’ll have to do the tracking. But I know the genre heading systems (and the various means of navigating them to find what you need) like the proverbial back o’ my hand so can help speed up your process of determining which headings are the best ones to use in your tracking.
P.S. I’m working at home today and tomorrow and the software I use is much better at the genre heading identification/searching than any of the webpages available to the public.
No problem. Just wish it’d been something that might be more likely to be familiar to American publishers; Stableford is British.