A Cold Hunger

Dear Agent,

Complete at 77k words, A COLD HUNGER is an adult, upmarket psychological suspense novel set against the backdrop of the #vanlife social media movement. It combines dual POVs and slow-burn suspense like Sally Hepworth’s THE GOOD SISTER with darker content, stylistic sensibilities, female lead, and classist themes reminiscent of Virginia Feito’s VICTORIAN PSYCHO. Many of the novel’s locations and lifestyle descriptions are informed by Aaron’s experiences living in and traveling out of vans. 

Rory, a small town mechanic, is cold, hungry, and her beat up van is no place to call home. Standing atop her town’s bridge and ready to surrender amid a crushing winter, a pushed YouTube notification and video pulls her away from the edge. At the video’s heart is a beautiful young woman, Stacey, who resurrects Rory’s deeply buried impulsive tendencies.

Stacey and her partner Nick are the proud owners of a newly outfitted Sprinter van and have a one year ticket to pursue their professional influencer dreams. As they travel and struggle attracting viewers, Rory’s obsession with Stacey deepens. Rory’s life improves too. The winter recedes, she rediscovers her passion for dissecting, sketching, and eating wild animals, and her new parasocial relationship keeps her from feeling quite so alone.

Months pass, and Nick and Stacey’s fortunes finally turn after posting almost-naked photos of Stacey for their video thumbnails. But before they can turn their new viewers into endorsement deals, their van breaks down near Rory’s small town, needing repairs that would drain their remaining startup funds. As their van waits in Rory’s employer’s garage, she stalks them, and overhears their predicament through the thin walls of the town’s only motel. Desperately afraid of facing another winter alone, Rory cannot allow them to end their journey. Thankfully, a tiny lie about Mercedes covering the repair is all it takes to fix their problem. In a gesture of goodwill for architecting the complimentary repair, Stacey gifts Rory a makeup kit and makeover before shooting a promotional video for the garage. Unable to control herself, Rory lunges into a mid-makeover kiss with Stacey and is immediately rebuffed.

Nick and Stacey depart, and as the fraud and rejection unravel Rory’s tenuous stability, the pair are oblivious to the danger they invite by flaunting their burgeoning prosperity to Rory and the rest of the digital world.

In addition to the manuscript for A Cold Hunger, a screenplay treatment is also available (though in need of some edits/improvements). The film adaptation would compare to A24 style films, would require a low budget, and the character work for Rory would involve substantial growth/development that may have unique appeal to prospective talent. Some viral marketing opportunities may also exist.

A Cold Hunger Inspiration and Outlook

Hey. Aaron here.

After a particularly stressful project at one of my old engineering positions, I took to the road for six months to travel while staying involved part-time. I spent a few weeks building out an old sprinter van, and left Houston in early January with Breckenridge as my destination. What followed was six(ish) weeks of being colder than I’d ever been in my life while also doing some of the best skiing I had ever (or would ever) do. By mid/late February I left the mountains for the desert, made my way to the coast, and began exploring the great state of California. Oregon and Washington followed, then a faster than I wanted cruise through the more central West to visit Glacier, Yellowstone, Tetons, and all the many wonderful spots in Utah/Arizona.

The trip was life affirming in a badly needed sort of way, and I was lucky to spend some real time in a handful of truly magical places. Novel experiences were encountered daily, and I gradually adjusted to the rhythm of life on the road.

Sleeping in a van every night is a unique experience. Especially when you don’t have a great method of keeping that space warm and it’s zero degrees out.

Or, when you’re parked up at an isolated escape deep in grizzly country. Or if you’re in a Walmart parking lot with some clearly sketchy people roaming around with nothing to do and nothing to lose.

There was a night outside of Pink Sand Dunes State park where the silence was so complete that I could hear the blood flowing through my head, I could hear my own heartbeat thundering in my skull.

All of these moments reinforced one core idea – life on the road can provide experiences that are deeply unfamiliar to most people, and some of those experiences can be viscerally disturbing.

I first mentioned the idea of building a story around that insight and tapping into the fear that can sometimes bubble up to a friend in Houston in late 2019 or early 2020. They thought it was intriguing, and the idea continued to resonate. Over Christmas break in 2020, quarantining at home home with my parents, I sat down and started writing the first version of the screenplay that would later be titled, “The End of the Road.” It was the first writing project I actually managed to finish. That was a huge moment for me, and I was happy to celebrate that milestone, if nothing else.

That first version had a lot more Nick and Stacey, a lot less of Rory. She was a half-formed character, more tool than real person. Some friends and family read that exceedingly rough draft and gave me some compelling notes. The biggest and most common, was that Rory was by-far the most interesting character, and needed more development and page time.

I wrote a whole novel (Amid the Ashes) in between that first screenplay draft and the first novel draft. The novel re-oriented the story around Rory. A few people gave me feedback.

I went back to work, self-published Amid the Ashes, and let a couple years pass. A second screenplay draft was initiated from scratch. New characters, plot ideas, and a big twist entered the picture, and were eventually folded into the novel. The screenplay and novel both received paid evaluations, two from The Blacklist and one developmental edit.

My dev editor’s feedback was quite generous. There were some rough spots that needed patching (and honestly there are probably still spots that could be improved with a more detailed editorial pass), but the highs were high enough to justify the effort of fixing what I could accomplish myself and encouraged me to wade back into the query waters.

And so here we are. Sending out cold emails, hungry for a miracle.

If you’d like to help this story reach its potential, please don’t hesitate to reach out to request additional material.

Aaron