Face-Lift 56

Guess the Plot

Pale Girls Shaped Like Crucifixes

1. Her career in eclipse, supermodel Kate Moss combines fundamentalism with heroin and emerges with the year's hottest trend. The Opus Dei crowd is not amused.

2. Life in seventeenth-century Holland is so dull that sometimes Hans starts to get funny ideas about the windmills.

3. In the mortifying world of teen popularity, an eating disorder is almost compulsory - especially when you're teetering on the brink, and your best friends are determined to "help" you.

4. The new girl in town seduces Mickey. So how can he say No, when she later asks him to blow up the nuclear power plant?

5. Four girlfriends, all intended vampire victims whose supernatural attackers didn't finish the job, band together and use their ghoulish powers to fight the bloodsucker population in a rural Maine town.

6. The Crucifix Killer is back, killing only pale-skinned women. As his victims accrue, business booms in tanning salons across Manhattan.


Original Version

After watching the stars together one last time, Mickey Sullivan's grade-school love, Miranda Taverse, has a mental breakdown and is hospitalized. [She cracked under the pressure of Mickey constantly calling her "Virgo."] He can only communicate with her through cryptic phone calls,

[Ring . . . ring.

Miranda: Hello?

Mickey: The elm tree is on the kettle drum.

Miranda: And the barge is floating upstream.

Mickey: The hand is quicker than the eye.

Miranda: And the pen is mightier than the sword.

Mickey: But nothing is blacker than the crow at midnight.

Miranda: Dog is man's best friend.

Mickey: But whose best friend is one of those wooden Chinese puzzle balls?

Miranda: Talk to you later.]

and he eventually forgets that he ever loved her.

Four years later, Miranda still battles mental illness, and a strange girl named Riho [who is extremely pale and shaped like a crucifix] appears in Mickey's town who will ultimately reunite him with Miranda--but not before she seduces him herself and mysteriously asks him to blow up the town's nuclear power plant. [Women. They have no use for men, until they want the gutters cleaned or the nuclear power plant blown up.]

Under Riho's spell, Mickey seeks to destroy the power plant that provides electricity to all of the American southwest--[That's one big power plant. Fortunately, it's completely unguarded, so Mickey should have no trouble slipping in with a truckload of dynamite.] to reveal the stars that have been lost behind decades of light pollution. [Does Mickey consider the possibility that he will die of radiation poisoning before the nuclear cloud from the explosion dissipates enough to expose the stars? Nah, he's just a kid. A 20-year-old kid.] When the lights go out, the stars will shine for the first time since Mickey said goodbye to Miranda. [Presumably you don't mean that literally; they said goodbye four years ago, and the stars have been lost behind light pollution for decades.]

"Pale Girls Shaped Like Crucifixes" is a 74,000-word, completed work of literary fiction. It is a wryly humorous tale of ordinary and extraordinary people who fight love, illness, and the oppression of dysfunctional families. [The big three of literary fiction.] It offers hope for the future, and I have drawn on the experiences of a close friend who has endured mental illness like Miranda's to lend realism to that hope.

A synopsis, sample chapters, or the entire manuscript are available at your request. Enclosed are the first ten pages and an SASE for your convenience. Thank you for your time. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,


Revised Version
[Minor revisions to the three plot paragraphs--the rest seems fine.]

After stargazing one last time with her grade-school love Mickey Sullivan, Miranda Taverse has a mental breakdown and is hospitalized. She and Mickey can communicate only through cryptic phone calls. Eventually, Mickey forgets that he ever loved Miranda.

Four years later, Miranda continues to battle mental illness, and a strange girl named Riho appears in town. Riho will ultimately reunite Mickey with Miranda--but not before she seduces him herself and mysteriously asks him to blow up the town's nuclear plant.

Under Riho's spell, Mickey seeks to destroy the power plant that provides electricity to all of the American southwest, thus revealing stars that have been lost behind decades of light pollution. When the lights go out, the stars will shine for Mickey . . . for the first time since he said goodbye to Miranda.


Notes

It's not clear whose family is dysfunctional, or how big a role Miranda plays once Mickey forgets he ever loved her; whether those are more important plot points than the nuclear plant, EE doesn't know.