Untitled by Conan Jones
Takeshi Nishimoto escaped from the demands of his family and the unbending traditions of rural Japan two years ago. Now he’s an average American with a job, a home, and a life in Southern California. He’s married to a thoroughly un-Japanese, but loving woman, he has friends, and he’s slowly learning the language. Life is good
But he has unwittingly carried something with him from Japan. A demon, carried in a household object and born out of a hundred years of memories. A Tsukumogami. It appears in his dreams, scared and angry, and starts making demands: “Take me home!”
Takeshi can handle the nightmares. But then people start dying in a series of increasingly gruesome incidents, forcing him to face the reality of the threat that the Tsukumogami poses. As myths come to life and the killings get closer to home, he races to find a way to stop the demon, refusing to admit that the only way to stop them might be to return to the place he swore he’d never go back to.
Arielle & David: We love the idea of a demon in a household object! And its foreignness adds to its intrigue. You’ve also got a nice reverse Dorothy thing going on here. Instead of wanting to go home more than anything, your protagonist will do anything not to go home. And the stakes go up as more horrible things happen and he is forced to come to terms with his aversion to his homeland. What can be improved? First of all, what’s the household object?! Is this a genie in a bottle sort of thing? Is it an ancient teapot? A descriptor would be great. Same goes for his wife, his home, and the rural Japanese village he is from. You’ve got 75 words to spare here and we need these to really get a sense of your story. Lastly, we must have some comparable titles. We have no idea how literary or how commercial this book is. We’re not sure what writers/books your writing/book is like.