Hello all. Thank you for your feedback to Version 1 of this query.
Based on an interesting suggestion from u/PondasWallArt, I decided to rewrite the story pitch from Apogee's perspective, instead of the journalist. Interested to hear how you all think the two versions compare. Thank you in advance.
My own critique: I'm not a fan of meta editorialization at the end of queries, but I really struggle to find a better way to wrap up the pitch. What I have is very true to the novel and the characters, but I'm open to alternatives.
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Dear [Agent's Name],
I am seeking representation for World With an End, an 83,000-word work of literary fiction.
Buels Gore, Vermont, 1939. Addison Pouliot Gibbs is supposed to be dead. The revolutionary symbol he was made to be—Apogee, the face of everything—died in a car bombing more than a decade ago. Only his driver survived, and is now dying of consumption in a remote sanatorium. That, at least, is the official story.
When a journalist arrives to interview the dying man, Addison cannot remain silent. The past, however, resists coherence. He reveals a lonely child who finds belonging setting type for an underground printing press in Québec. When he is betrayed by a comrade, his community is destroyed and he narrowly escapes imprisonment in a hard labor camp. The tenuous life he rebuilds with an elderly couple in the forest is shattered when the revolution arrives on his very doorstep. Years later, he has become Apogee, a guerilla fighting for the breakaway Workers’ Commune of Vermont. A single act of reluctant heroism transforms him into the icon of the fledgling administration—worshiped by the people, but infinitely vulnerable. As death approaches, Addison knows that the journalist has finally glimpsed the truth written upon his fragile body: revolutions rarely run their course and myths are as temporary as the people they are built upon.
World With an End is informed by [a relevant experience]. The novel will appeal to readers of Annie Berest's The Postcard, with its reconstruction of a life through fragmented testimony, and Paul Lynch's Prophet Song, in its portrait of a society whose civic fabric is violently dismantled.