“We must choose to live in the light or live in the dark and I’ve made my choice.”
That’s the suicide note of Mason Ellis, 18-year-old Mason Ellis, a Jersey Shore aspiring rock star whose messy and complicated life comes to a horrible end. Does it come to an end during the book or before the book opens? You might need to change the verb tense here
In his absence, those left behind have to also make that same choice.
Mason’s brother Declan tries to write his brother’s life into fiction, wrestling with his own sexual identity in the process, while his widowed mother Jane guides her only remaining son through grief, pain, and new love. His bandmate Jake steals Mason’s song and catapults himself into a life of fame, fortune, and excess, leaving his mother Helen and brother Elijah behind and betraying Mason’s memory. Mason’s girlfriend Lizzy, racked by guilt at what she knew before Mason died, tries desperately to keep her friend's memory alive, but her guilt ultimately forces her to the same crossroads Mason faced. In the background, an increasingly unhinged group of nationalists called The Liberators threaten to destroy the country from the inside out, sending our cast of characters on a collision course with personal and national heartbreak. With each chapter told from a different character at a different point in the future, Song For The Dead is a story about grief and pain, but also about how we take that pain and use it. We all have to make the same choice as Mason, and our characters, for better or worse, come to understand that by story’s end.
We move, as the narrative progresses, from tremendous darkness to, in the final pages, light and hope. The last chapter is the only one in the narrative from Mason's perspective—a portion of the novel that borderlines on the speculative. And maybe...just maybe...it's the ending he deserved, not the one he got. Stories are the places we can say goodbye, ask for forgiveness, tell somebody we love them before they go. That is what stories do: they allow the impossible to become possible—even taking impossible pain and transforming it into something like love.
I'm not going to go through line by line, although I would be happy to make suggestions if you like. But I think you really need to tighten up this query. Stop telling what the book is about (grief, pain, etc.), and tell what the story is about. Is it Declan's story? Is he the main POV character? Then tell what happens to him. You've got too many names in the query for an agent to keep track of. Three or four names is the usual number.
You've also got too many subplot lines going. Find the main plot and go with that and just hint that there's more. The purpose of a query is to make the agent want to read your book, not to tell the entire plot with all its subplots. Keep it simpler.
The paragraph that starts "We move" can be deleted entirely. You want the reader to come to those conclusions. You're telling the reader what to feel rather than showing how you make them feel that way. Have you checked out Query Shark? That's a good resource for simplifying queries. I know your story is literary, so you get some leniency, but this query is just all over the place. It doesn't convey the "literary" aspect of literary fiction, either. Your query reads more commercial than literary right now.
