QK Round 2: The Fisherman vs. Zone Tripper

Entry Nickname: The Fisherman
Title: The Fisherman
Word count: 90K
Genre: Adult Literary Suspense

Query:

Everyone Jude Fisher has ever loved is dead. His parents, his three best friends, the love of his life—they’ve all gone to their untimely graves. And Jude has killed them, every one. It’s a curse: when he loves someone, they’re laid low. It never fails. They always die.

THE FISHERMAN pits the world-weary, 22-year-old Jude against the ultra-violent Lucas Moordenaar, a depraved killer who murdered Jude’s parents a decade before, triggering the boy’s tragic malediction. When Lucas is about to be paroled, Jude embarks on a relentless, three-day mission from Minnesota to upstate New York, where Lucas sits in prison, waiting for him like some terrible spider. Jude must stop the man who birthed his curse from going free: if he doesn’t, he’ll be forever doomed to walk the earth, killing anyone unlucky enough to become his friend.

Jude trips through trains, buses, city streets, and country roads on his spasmodic journey to Greenvale State Penitentiary, haunted by his dead loved ones. He is tortured especially by the apparition of his lovely Angela, whose death wounded him worst of all. Her dying wish was that Jude seek out the man that murdered his parents and learn the truth about his curse. Jude won’t let her down: he will meet this monstrous evil face-to-face.

First 250 words:

The question I get most since they chucked me in this hole is this: Are you sorry for what you done? Everybody asks me, when they find out what I done. And its sorta an interestin question. It sets me to thinkin.

See, there are probly a few who are sorry. The two pukes I wasted in here for starters. If you could ask them now, which you cant, they would most definitely wish I hadnt squirted up into the system and trickled down and out the shitpipe into scenic Greenvale State Peniten-shee-ary.

Its like I always says: you dont cross Big Luke. Some learnt that little factoid harder than others, but they all learnt it. Tell the truth bout them pukes I dusted, the both of em deserved what they got. Anyone I ever waxed deserved it, matter of plain fact. They was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, all of them.

But the little kid, you see, the reason I landed here—he maybe didnt deserve what he got. But hell, I still aint even answered the questionI done my share of crazy shit, but I always meant to do it. Always did it with purpose. But with the kid, I didnt mean for none of it to happen the way it did.

And I might tell you too much over the next few pages. I might tell you all about shit I done thatll make you want to puke. Hell, you might even grow to hate me a little. You wouldnt be the first.

Versus

Entry Nickname: Zone Tripper
Title: Zone Trippers
Word count: 90,000
Genre: Adult SciFi

Query:

Owen MacIntyre already lost his wife to cancer and now his daughter is missing. But he can’t just file a missing person’s report—Eve is infected with Zone Tripper’s disease, which causes people across the globe to involuntarily swap souls en masse. Eve’s body remains at home, serving as a revolving door for other zone trippers, while her soul leaps into other trippers all over the world.

In quick progression, Eve finds herself in a Chinese slave laborer, a blind French woman, then in a dying woman. Only a train stop away from home, Eve’s soul jumps once more and she hasn’t been heard from since.

Owen struggles with the strong personalities rotating through Eve’s body as he continues to search for Eve’s soul, using the website he co-creates with one of Eve’s visiting souls, Humberto.

Meanwhile, the world has segregated itself into two camps—the trippers and the statics. The survival odds for zone trippers are falling fast, with horrific conditions waiting on the other side of a bad trip.

And to further complicate their fates, a tasteless reality show, Identity Theft, debases victims on international television while zone-tripping serial murderer, called the Infinity Killer, has put other trippers in his cross hairs.

Owen must risk his own safety—and soul—before he loses his daughter for good. But how do you find a missing person when it's her soul that's left?

First 250 words:
Home is where the heart breaks, my wife had always said.

She wasn’t wrong.

The garage door opened its jaws and swallowed my car whole. Each time I pulled into the drive, it’s a fist to the gut. My daughter Eve’s Toyota sat in the third bay, seemingly miles away. A small ghost of an oil stain marks the center spot.

Walking out to the bricked mailbox in the frigid March air, I leafed through today’s bills, which included a tuition payment. I had agreed to pay for Eve’s frivolous photography degree, but only if she factored in a few business courses, achieved stellar grades, and lived at home.

Photography is a hobby. Taking pictures isn’t a career. How many times had I told Eve that?

A junk mail letter with Penelope’s name caught between the tuition statement and a flyer. I stopped rifling and swallowed hard. Shouldn’t this have stopped by now? It had been three years. Ironically, it was an ad for life insurance.

Viewing the house from the outside made it seem emptier. Penelope had stood here almost every day, gathering the mail—until she was too sick to walk outside. The house held 5,200 square feet of broken memories. Her fingerprints could still be seen on her vanity mirror but her absence echoed from every corner. Her love seat held air, her bedside table sat naked, and her painting studio was empty now except for dust. Every night I forced myself to enter this tomb for Eve’s sake.