[QCrit] MAMA’S LIL HONEY BADGER - Adult Upmarket Crime - 99,000 words

Hi y’all,

This has gone through countless revisions, and I’m still not fully happy with it. I don’t know if it’s the letter itself or just me not feeling the whole shindig, but I’d love your takes and pointers, my Redditor dearests.

P.S. A lit agent told me to lead with the professional background, hence the somewhat unusual opening.

________________________

Dear Mr. Skibidiboopboop,

I'm a X-based expat working in crime intelligence, specializing in organized crime, money laundering, and human trafficking investigations. So naturally, I wrote a novel about the kind of people I get paid to catch.

Told through two confessions set twenty-five years apart, MAMA’S LIL’ HONEY BADGER is my debut novel about a piss-poor kid’s rise into a man both the FBI and Cosmopolitan will eventually brand Wall Street's Most Wanted CEO. Complete at 99,000 words, it is a voice-driven, A24-style standalone crime novel—a mean, feral cousin of Trent Dalton's Boy Swallows Universe, exploring the decades-long consequences in the spirit of Deepti Kapoor's Age of Vice.

*

Before fourteen-year-old Levi Dempsey can convince Father Avery that laundering drug money is what God would want, he needs the priest to understand two things.

First, that becoming Brooklyn’s biggest ecstasy wholesaler was an accident.

Second, that good boys sometimes do bad things—especially when the American healthcare system has made it clear that uninsured single mothers with brain tumors can go ahead and die unless someone comes up with fifty thousand dollars.

So while the rest of Brooklyn’s teenagers spend the damp summer of ’91 counting armpit hairs and losing their virginity, Levi’s busy mopping the floors of a Bushwick brothel, hustling to put something toward his mama’s hospital bills. One morning, when a rendezvous between drug traffickers turns into a bloodbath, Levi does what any desperate, catastrophically unsupervised child opportunist would do: he takes the bag everyone just killed each other over.

With his mama’s tumor growing one millimeter a week, Levi begins a feral little hero’s journey through New York’s underworld, hustling to sell the drugs in time while Vietnamese traffickers hunt their stolen product and a friendly neighborhood cop follows the trail of bodies he leaves behind. Before the week is out, in the cramped confessional of a Brooklyn parish, Levi will recount the story to a Catholic priest, in a desperate attempt to turn him into an unwitting accomplice. 

Twenty-five years later, Levi lives on the front pages of the tabloids as Wall Street’s infamous prince. On the morning of his fortieth birthday, as the FBI closes in on his fraudulent empire, he sets out to ruin his own father's life—and murder the man who ruined his.

I appreciate your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you,

Boopity-boop-boop

First 300: 

With what I reckon is a small-dick-compensating Magnum .357 pressed into my pimpled forehead, I think about my mother. 

I think about how much pain it'll cause her. How there'll be none of that usual laughter anymore on Sunday nights after church, when we get ourselves chocolate-covered raisins and Bon Ton BBQ corn chips and watch America's Funniest Home Videos and she laughs so hard at some dude's toupee flying off on a roller coaster that she chokes on a raisin and I have to slap her back and she waves me off saying, I'm fine, I'm fine, pumpkin, and then in the next clip a kid nails his old man in the nuts with a baseball bat and she starts choking all over again, wheezing how it oughta be you, Levi, baby, swinging that bat at your good-for-nothing father's meatballs. Yeah. There'll be none of that anymore. And tonight's meatballs she'll make for dinner? They’ll get cold waiting for me—me who'll never get home 'cause this guy's gonna put one through my skull and dissolve my scrawny ass in sodium hydroxide, the magical pH 14 that'll hydrolyze every protein bond in my body till there ain't nothing left of Levi Dempsey but amino acids and three dental fillings. He's gonna literally instant ramen me up and pour me down the drain, 'cause that's what they do to dead bodies. I know that.

And that thought about sodium hydroxide makes me think about myself, thinking maybe I had some prospects after all if I already knew shit like that. And as the guy holding the gun keeps staring at me and yapping, I'm kneeling there in a puddle of my own piss hearing jack shit. All his words blur into one big nothing while I mull over the final anecdote about my life cut short:

This is how I die—at fourteen in a fucking whorehouse, listening to the distant sound of Mama Thornton's ‘Hound Dog’ playing somewhere in the main room.