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.