Successful Queries: Emma Dries and “False Prophet,” by Afsheen Farhadi

Welcome back to the Successful Queries series. In this installment, find a query letter to agent Emma Dries (Triangle House Literary) for Afsheen Farhadi's debut novel, False Prophet (formerly known as The Fear of Being Human).

Afsheen Farhadi was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and his short fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, Catapult, Bright Lights Film Journal, and elsewhere. He served as the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Creative Writing, Prose at Southern Methodist University, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Reno.

THE FEAR OF BEING HUMAN follows Jal Persad, an actor facing an existential crisis after his mother’s death. Unable to make sense of his mother’s life, Jal begins working with a ghostwriter to tell his mom’s story, focusing primarily on her adolescence in Guyana, during the period that her family fractured and the Jonestown settlement was established. However, Jal begins reimagining his mom’s past, placing her in Jonestown and in direct contact with notorious cult leader Jim Jones. While Jal is at first enthralled by making his mom the hero of this story, giving her new life in death, the lie threatens to ruin his career and reputation. By the time Jal convinces himself to come clean, however, his story goes viral as an indictment of megalomaniac men. Jal must figure out how to negotiate the growing frenzy, deciding whether to tell the truth, or ride a wave that threatens to transform him into the same type of false prophet that is his story’s villain.

In line with Emma Cline’s The Girls, Hernan Diaz’s Trust, and Percival Everett’s Erasure, THE FEAR OF BEING HUMAN alternates between Jal’s first-person narration and the story of his mother’s run in with The Peoples Temple. Part character study, part literary thriller, the novel explores the legacy of colonialism, the psychology of false prophets, as well as the way mythologizing the past can change us, for better or worse.

My short fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, Colorado Review, The Rumpus, The Millions, Catapult, Subtropics, and elsewhere. I have a PhD in creative writing from the University of Cincinnati, where I was a Provost Graduate Fellow, and I'm currently the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Creative Writing, Prose at Southern Methodist University.

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How do you make a Jonestown story original? There have been countless stories, fictional and non, about cult leader Jim Jones and the violent end of him and his near-1,000 followers. But these stories have largely centered on the Peoples Temple members who migrated, en masse, from San Francisco to Jones’ settlement in Guyana. It felt remarkably fresh to be pitched a novel set in a Guyanese community—the Jonestown hook remains, but the new perspective is thrilling. Afsheen’s pitch also alludes to the novel’s unique structure, an alternating POV, one of which exists only in the primary narrator’s mind.

It’s clear from this letter that the novel is operating at a high literary register—tackling themes as intimate as grief and as ambitious as colonialism—while also committing to a propulsive plot. The final line of the first paragraph is rife with words suggesting momentum—”deciding,” “ride a wave,” “threatens to transform.” This line worked so well for me that I adapted it for my submission letter.

Finally, Afsheen’s comps: Contemporary comps aren’t just important from a sales perspective, but they also give me insight into whether or not a writer is reading what is being written today, which I think is critical. Each comp does something different—THE GIRLS for the cultiness, TRUST for the experimental structure and meta narrative. Having two contemporary comps allows for the older ERASURE (though a little more top of mind due to AMERICAN FICTION),  to remain. I would have included one more recent comp, and we ultimately did add YELLOWFACE when we went out on submission, in addition to changing the title to something punchier, which alluded to the dark megalomania at the novel’s core.

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Emma Dries is a writer and editor, and an agent at Triangle House Literary. She has worked on bestselling and award-winning books in editorial at Alfred A. Knopf, Doubleday Books, Ecco, and Flatiron Books. She has a B.A. in History from the University of Chicago and an M.F.A in Fiction from Johns Hopkins University. Her writing has been published in Outside, Lit Hub, Bookforum, Dwell and she was the finalist for the Boston Review 2021 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest.