R. Adriel Vasquez [Contact redacted for online version] | roadvas.me
{DATE}
Dear Editor,
I’m writing to introduce Miku Is Missing, a literary dark romance with elements of psychological horror (complete at ~90,000 words). Think The Secret History meets Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, rendered with the detached, minimalist prose and ambient dread of Less Than Zero. This is a novel about extraction, consent, and the silence that binds us to bad cosmologies—a love story on the surface, a cult thriller at its core, and a meditation on the dissolution of self beneath. It’s Ballard meets Bulgakov in a perfumery cult.
Rafael Elias Varela, an American writer adrift in Europe and who self-soothes with romantic misadventure, is led by a love interest into a bio-existentialist cult of perfumers that harvests “high-vibrational” people for their chemical attributes. As Rafael’s ego unravels, he becomes complicit in the cult’s rituals, his exceptional “generative makeup” as a writer splitting the inner circle between transcendence and optimization. The stakes? If he fails to break free, he risks perpetuating his cycle of seduction and self-indulgent melancholy, forever “writing” his book but never finishing it—or worse, becoming a permanent fixture in the cult’s chemical alchemy.
Miku Is Missing works on three levels:
My background as a technical writer for fintech, mainframe software, and marketing has honed my ability to weave precision into intricate narratives, while my two decades living in Europe—mostly in Central Europe—have given me a sensitivity to synchronicity, romantic arcs, and the absurdities of expat life. This is my first novel, and the targeted aesthetic is soft minimalism meets ethereal brutalism, blending lyrical detachment with expository depth.
Per your submission guidelines, I’ve included {requested materials}. The full manuscript is available upon request.
Thank you for your time and consideration—I’d be delighted to send more.
Best regards,
R. Adriel Vasquez