/lit/ - Literature

>>21731259

>>17694253
One evening, his veins full of booze,
Our hero was out for a cruise:
"Are there nigs in this hood?
I don't care. It's all good:
With a car you can go where you choose!"

>>16080210

SYNOPSIS:

Semi-biographical about my father. Corporate lawyer loses job due to alcoholism. Turns violent. Loses his wife and children, his only love in the world. Ditches the booze and gets a job at a golf course cleaning the greens and doing grunt work. He falls in with a nefarious crowd of retired lawyers and big wigs at the course. There are children running around everywhere at the golf course. There's always little kids in the restaurants, hallways, etc. Protagonist gets spooked.

Eventually the protagonist finds himself caught up in a criminal kabal / secret society operating out of the golf course.

The powerful men in the kabal promise to get the protagonist's family back if he commits a certain evil deed.

Entire novel is interspersed with flashbacks to his former family life and life as a corporate lawyer, depicting how it fell apart. There are essentially two timelines.

The final scene is ambiguous as to which timeline it takes place. Whichever timeline you believe it to be will alter how the preceding climax transpired.

I'm not good at synopses.

For a synopsis, here's the query letter I sent to prospective agents:

>Kevin Little, a disgraced ex-corporate lawyer, didn’t expect to become a groundskeeper at a golf course in his midlife. But neither did he foresee threatening his old boss with murder, getting shipped away to jail, becoming disbarred, and losing his wife and children.

>Now, Kevin wants it all back. To do so, he’s willing to start over—even if it kills him, and it nearly does.

>Kevin misses his kids desperately, which is made all the more uncomfortable by the many small children mysteriously roaming about the golf course unattended. They appear in basement corridors and behind locked doors without explanation.

>When Kevin falls in with a nefarious circle of ex-lawyers and retired big wigs at the golf course, he finds a path to winning back his family. They’ve been watching him since his days on Bay Street, and have carefully groomed him for their horrific child-preying inner circle.

>At the demand of a wolfish white-collar cabal, Kevin ultimately faces a heinous proposition: murder two children, and retake his family.

>The story unfolds in two timelines: one in the present, and another as flashbacks to Kevin’s former family life that depict his fall from grace. The final scene is ambiguous as to which timeline it takes place in—how one places the scene determines whether Kevin is truly redeemed.

>[NOVEL TITLE] is a tight standalone work complete at 55,000 words that blends literary fiction with elements of mystery and thriller. It aspires to the precision of Jeffrey Eugenides’ THE VIRGIN SUICIDES and the intimate tragedy of Scott McLanahan’s THE SARAH BOOK. It is my debut novel.

Ey i usually just lurk but I'm 6 pages in so far and am actually finding this quite enjoyable. Maybe it could use a little editing, a line here or there doesn't resonate as much as I feel they intended yet even more lines stand out in an amusing way that seems unintentional and natural, it inspires me to try write myself. Great for a draft, I might even finish it and if so I look forward to how you employ the timeline gimmick for the ending. Also main character reminds me of pic, any chance you took inspiration from it? And how long have you been working on the novel?