9 Agents Looking for A24-esque Horror
Where to Query This Week (5.14.25) | Plus how one author turned her autofiction into a thriller—and finally got an agent
Welcome to Sub Club’s Where to Query This Week!
This week, we welcome
, the author of Nothing Serious, which came out this past February from Harper Collins. Below, Emily shares how she landed her literary agent—not by abandoning her story, but by transforming it.After years of querying an autofiction novel that was praised for its voice but passed on for its lack of plot, she took the same emotional arc and reimagined it as a thriller. The result? A book deal with William Morrow. This is a candid look at what happens when a writer rewrites the manuscript, but not their entire approach to storytelling.
How I Got An Agent By Turning My Auto-Fiction Novel Into A Thriller
I spent almost four years querying my first novel, a shamefully autobiographical story about a 35-year-old woman in tech untangling from male influence. Each week, I’d adjust my query letter ever so slightly and send it out to a new round of agents from my growing spreadsheet of names, my rejection tally creeping toward three figures. I labored over that book for years between my actual full-time job in tech. In the end, it was a sacrificial novel that would never be published, but the process of writing it—taking classes, workshopping pages, trying, failing, then trying again to make it better—not only taught me how to write a novel, but helped me prove to myself that I could.
I held out hope for so long because requests for the full manuscript were not infrequent; agents claimed to like the writing and premise. But ultimately, almost all the agents who read it in full had the same feedback: there wasn’t enough plot.
Fair enough. Big plot-driven stories were never my thing. Instead, I was drawn to narrative-driven character journeys, sitting inside someone’s mind for hundreds of pages.
But you can only bang your head against the same wall so many times before admitting defeat. More than anything, I wanted to tell the story of a woman in tech crawling out from a life of male influence and—crucially—I wanted that story to be read. So I challenged myself to write a similar character arc, but one with a real, juicy plot—specifically, a death. And after a few months of toying with the prompt, the idea for my next novel hit.
Unlike my first novel, which started with a series of disconnected scenes, slowly braided together over time, the idea for NOTHING SERIOUS came, from start to end, at once. I wrote the first draft in a fever dream, needing to get it all down to see if it worked as a whole. Since the book had mystery and thriller elements, I began reading Tana French and Agatha Christie somewhat fanatically, learning, with each clever chapter, how to lay out clues, to both guide and mislead the reader, then tie it together in the end. For pacing and plot, I read novels like Girl on the Train and The Perfect Nanny.
Writing that first draft was both a blast and an embarrassment. It was amazing to see the events come alive on the page, and once I had finished, I knew the book could work. But I was also deeply ashamed at how plot-heavy it was. I worried it was a caricature of a book, and at that point it kind of was. I hadn’t yet layered the characters enough to make them feel human, I’d mostly worked out the plot points— the inverse of my first book.
I queried it a few times early on, but no one bit, and in a fit of shame, I abandoned it for three years, too embarrassed to even open the Scrivener file. But over those years, my eyes opened to more stories using plot-driven devices to dissect human issues. I was drawn to shows like Killing Eve and Big Little Lies, which wove a feminist narrative with juicy, deadly plots. When I heard Mike White, the creator of White Lotus, explain in an interview that in order to get people to care about a human story, you had to throw in a murder, my jaw dropped in recognition. I began reading novels known for their complex characters and masterful eeriness: Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and Daphne Du Muer’s Rebecca. They were all so brilliant, and exactly what I wanted to do.
Three years after I’d originally shelved it, I dusted off my manuscript and found that I actually liked what I read. The foundation was there, and it wasn’t a caricature; it was a sketch. It just needed filling in.
I spent six months reviving the novel. I saw the ways in which the main character was too embittered, the villain too evil. Of course they were—they were outlines of characters, raw and coarsely drawn. With each edit, I added a layer of humanity and nuance based on my own real-life observations and experiences, in the same way I’d written my first novel. All that time, the plot remained stable and sturdy like bones behind the flesh.
When I finally began querying again, agents were much quicker to reply. And though it still took me 32 queries to get a “yes”—most agents wanted even more of a thriller, whereas my ending was more literary—I finally signed with Aurora Fernandez of Trident Media, who immediately connected with the book. Especially the nuanced ending.
As a person coming into the writing world cold and with no connections, getting an agent was by far the hardest part of the process for me. Once I signed with Trident, it took us only two rounds of edits to submit to publishers. A few weeks after we went on submission, I got an offer from William Morrow (HarperCollins).
It’s tricky to know when to take feedback and when to ignore it. But if we hear the same feedback over and over—and can find a way to integrate it while still holding onto what drives us to the page in the first place—we should listen. It’s hard to trust your instincts as a writer while keeping your ears open to the reader. But all we can do is find the story that keeps us coming back, the one we’re unable to let go of, then find a way to craft that story in such a way that, hopefully, has the same effect on the reader.
Emily J. Smith's debut novel, NOTHING SERIOUS, is out now from William Morrow (HarperCollins). Emily founded the dating app, Chorus, and has led teams at top tech companies. She publishes regularly in her newsletter, Unresolving, and runs the workshop From Corporate to Creative Writer. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Catapult, Salon, Slate, Hobart, Medium, The Washington Post, Vice, and other publications. You can find more on her website and socials.
P.S. While you’re querying this summer (or refreshing your inbox for replies 👀), why not start your next book?! The Wild Draft is a 6-month novel-writing cohort to help you build momentum, finish a messy first draft, and stay creatively grounded, with
! We start in June, and enrollment closes May 28. Grab your spot while you can!10 Agents Looking for A24-esque Horror
This list is perfect if your horror writing is moody, slow-burning, cerebral, and emotionally rich. Whether you’re writing about cults, possession, generational trauma, or haunted forests, these agents are open to horror that elevates genre tropes and leaves readers unsettled in the best way.
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