Face-Lift 1452

Guess the Plot

A Graveyard of Scarecrows

1. A sacred order of warriors must rise up against the Crow King in order to thwart his campaign to collect and hoard all the shiny things.

2. Set in a cornfield, this YA dystopian narrative pits the adolescent scions of two farming communities against each other. Slowly, their hatred increases until the Porker family and the Beefy family start sending out spies to take out each others mascots... the titular scarecrows.

3. There is a graveyard where even a murder of crows will not go. It's spookier than any other graveyard. It's the graveyard where all the actors who've ever played Scarecrow in The Wiz are buried.

4. Everything has a place to go when it dies, even things which weren't originally alive. As far as Bubba was concerned, the remains of scarecrows weren't near as creepy as the remains of mannequins. But that was before they rose up seeking Brraaaiiiinnnnnssssss.

5. Edgar puts scarecrows in the graveyard where he's caretaker to keep ravens from carrying the souls of the dead to hell. Betsy Lou doesn't mind being dead, but it's crowded here now that the ravens aren't coming. Crowded with souls of the Wicked Ones.

6. There have been 457 sequels of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but never a prequel. Until now.

7. When Billy hears about that little town in America where scarecrows come alive at night, he takes a road trip to spy on them and elevate his TikTok game. However, the travel brochure from the truck stop didn’t mention their taste for human flesh.

8. A horrible storm has wiped out half of Aaron's crops and killed most of his family. But when the weather clears, he turns tragedy into triumph by stuffing straw into what few scraps of his family's clothing he can find and starting an internet scarecrow store.

9. When a controversial statue disappears from a college campus, the city is thrown into chaos. Possibly because there aren't enough funds available to replace the statue. They could afford to replace it with a scarecrow, but no one has the guts to bring that idea up.

Original Version

Dear X,

Hope you’re well! 

I thought you might enjoy A Graveyard of Scarecrows. Sitting at 81,000 words, it's [is] a work of magic realist literary fiction set in an uncanny, postcolonial Devonshire, complete with more than a dash of statue politics. [Why does every query letter lately sound like someone's trying to punk me?] 

When senior lecturer Dr. Kunju Kuriakose travels to the UK and enrols [enrolls] as an undergraduate at The Decolonised University of England (DUE), she has an excuse [explanation] for the academic regression: she's going 'undercover'. 

KK plans to use the time as a literary retreat to finally write her Great Postcolonial Campus Novel, but her five carefully curated animals non-native to Devonshire spark a series of surreal events. Starting with [including] the disappearance of a controversial imperialist statue, to [and several] Grade II buildings crumbling into dust, the [. The] small campus city is thrown into chaos. KK however, is not - sentient statues and self-renaming roads are after all, common in the Global South. 

The DUE do three things: first, take credit for the statue's disappearance as part of an upcoming decolonising project, Taming the Past. Second, launch a six-figure grant bid for said project. Third, find a scapegoat, [At first I thought that said "find a scarecrow." For some reason I thought sooner or later I'd come upon a scarecrow. Or a graveyard.] threaten her with deportation for falsifying her student status and hiding her credentials, [If she didn't tell DUE the truth about her status and credentials, who was she providing an excuse (explanation) to?] then offer her a deal. KK can write her Great Postcolonial Campus Novel and get paid a salary to boot, if she agrees to be the principal investigator named on the grant bid. Simultaneously native informant and revolutionary symbol, she becomes the face of the movement...

...and the dealer-with [recipient?] of death threats, when the magical events in Devonshire prompts a national broadsheet headline "DECOTERRORISTS STRIKE DEVON".  ["Decoterrorists" sound like people who go into the art deco section of museums and spray  graffiti on the paintings.]

A Graveyard of Scarecrows will appeal to readers of Mithu Sanyal’s campus tragicomedy IDENTITTl, Amitav Ghosh’s GUN ISLAND for its environmental microcosms and postcolonial intertexuality, [Once this book is published, anyone who finishes Gun Island and goes looking for another book featuring environmental microcosms and postcolonial intertexuality will buy it.] as well as Tan Twan Eng’s THE HOUSE OF DOORS for its magical resurrection of buried histories. 

(PERSONALISATION)  A Graveyard of Scarecrows was initially conceived of as a memoir, and retains some autofictional elements. The work was funded by a £XXXXX grant from the XXXXXX. [So you got a grant to write a novel, and are using it to write a novel about someone who gets a grant which she uses to write a novel. That's brilliant.]

Notes

Why does KK have to be an undercover undergraduate? Is she taking undergraduate classes? Can't she attend graduate school without needing an excuse? 

What's the deal with her five animals? Are they responsible for the chaos, and is that why she brought them? 

Statue theft and changed street signs can be attributed to vandalism. Buildings becoming dust, not so much. Were there people in the buildings that crumbled into dust? Is that what they're seeking a scapegoat for? Are the people of England aware that magic exists?

If she just wants to write a novel set at this university, can't she just show up in town, hang out on campus, audit a few classes? Obviously she must have ulterior motives including being a native informant and/or causing chaos, but to what end? To use as plot points in her fantastical novel? As revenge for colonization? In other words, we don't want her "excuse" for enrolling, we want her real reason. Her goal, her plan to achieve it . . .