So…here are the pages I included with my query letters. It’s impossible to say whether it was beneficial to include them. Every agent asks for different things, but since I was primarily sending e-queries, I figured there was no harm in pasting in some of my writing for them to read. If they were interested enough at the end of the query to keep reading, they could do so. If not, no harm no foul. Of course, I would recommend against ever attaching any kind of document to a query, but pasting text beneath your query seems pretty harmless.
If, by the way, you have no idea what I’m talking about, please see my previous two entries.
Prologue
The Haunting of Las Mil y Una NochesIt is difficult to say with certainty whose soul first invaded the weather-worn pages of the four-hundred-and-sixth printed copy of Las Mil y Una Noches. If you asked the book, he would tell you that the specter who gave him life was none other than Jose Cartera, the book’s author. That’s what the book told me, anyway. I have reason to believe, however, that the book was not always honest with me.
We had an argument once, and I accused the book of actually being animated by none other than the ghost of Julio Santo del Cielo, as opposed to Jose Cartera.
The book barked back at me, “How could that be, Chachi?” (I’m not sure why the book called me Chachi. He also called me Gringo and Eggface and Cream Cheese and Lilypants and Pasty Smith.) “It must be that I am Jose. Don’t you remember? I made Julio wrestle that giant snake in the jungle. To make Julio do that, I had to be alive. To be alive, someone else had to be dead. Who was dead? Jose was dead. End of story.”
We were in a cabin. I was pacing. The cabin was made almost entirely of particle board, pine veneer, and rusty staples—perhaps some glue as well. The book was sitting on an end table next to an old coil space heater that was given to sparking. I’d put the book there because I was mad at him. He had a deathly fear of that space heater, but there was little he could do about it. Las Mil y Una Noches may have been able to talk, but he couldn’t move under his own power. That would just be weird.
“Maybe Julio wrestled the anaconda out of guilt,” I said. “Maybe he convinced himself to do it. I’m sure he was wracked with despair. He had to be. You had to be. And speaking of despair, what about Isabel Jones?”
“You don’t talk about Isabel.”
“Tell me one thing that was wrong with her.”
The cabin was one of several dug in on the north side of a mountain hollow. I was staying there because I didn’t have a choice. I was a prisoner. My captors were a man who wore only black and a woman who was a deeply religious nymphomaniac. At that particular moment, they were waiting on me in the “lodge.” I was late for supper. I hoped the woman was dressed. Dinner never tasted quite as tasty on naked nights.
“There was nothing wrong with her,” the book said. “She was perfection. She was beauty and love and grace and…”
I cut him off. “That’s my point. Jose was married to Isabel for twenty years. He would know she had flaws. Julio, on the other hand, loved Isabel from afar. In his lust, in your lust, you no doubt made her into the epitome of beauty and love and…”
“She died,” the book snapped. “Death makes everything perfect.”
“I would expect you to say that, Julio.”
“You got it wrong, Wonderloaf. All wrong. All completely ass-up, head-sideways wrong like you always do. I ain’t Julio. Once upon a time, I loved that pinché fucker. I thought he was the greatest friend a guy could ever have. I loved him. But now, now he is why I kill so many people.” Thunder did not, at that precise moment, boom. The sound was like, well, like the sound thunder doesn’t make. Kind of quiet. Maybe a cricket or two chirping.
(If you’re curious, the following is a short list of some of the people Las Mil y Una Noches insisted were his victims.
#1: A Yanamamo hunter who found a dead anaconda with a book-shaped bulge in its midsection and sliced the snake apart to free its treasure. Three weeks later, the hunter drowned in the Amazon, drunk for the first time in his short life.
#2: A French explorer who traded a bottle of cachaca to the hunter in exchange for the book. Three weeks later, the explorer jumped from the roof of a cathedral in Sao Paulo and splattered on the cobblestones below.
#3: A book dealer who purchased the book at a church rummage sale and then spent three weeks acquiring every last copy of The Thousand and One Nights he could find. He then proceeded to eat them, one by one, page by page. Before he could start on Las Mil y Una Noches, however, his stomach ruptured.
#4: Che Guevara.
#5: Jim Jones.
#6: Me, if the book could help it. At this point, the book and I had been on speaking terms for about two weeks and two days. To be honest, I was getting a bit nervous.)
“The main reason I don’t think you’re Jose is this,” I stated. “Jose was forgiving. Julio was an asshole. And you, my out-of-print friend, are an asshole.”
I caught a whiff of sour nutmeg curry wafting through the loose seams of my cabin. As I mentioned, I was late for supper with my captors. I picked up the book, carefully wrapped him in a pillowcase despite his squeals of protest, and gently slid him between my mattress and the rusty springs of my bed. I even turned off the space heater. Despite the book’s lies and the fact he had caused more disaster in my life than a gaggle of spited furies, I wanted to keep him safe. He was a gift after all, a gift from the greatest friend a guy could have had, a friend I loved even when he turned out to be a pinché fucker, a friend whose blood was still wet on my hands.
Fun fact: Those pages aren’t actually in the book any more. As an obsessive reviser, I thought it best to eliminate them, thus restoring, after 4 years and 4000 revisions, the original beginning to the book. Ahh…good times.