by Jude Atwood (@judeatwoodsketches)
MG Horror
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Query
I’m excited to share my new middle-grade comedy horror novel, HOW TO HANDLE A HAUNTING.
A lot of kids act out when their parents get divorced. Paul Salazar committed securities fraud. Since he was only twelve, he didn’t go to prison—but boy, was he grounded. Stuck in his mom’s creepy house, Paul braces for the most boring summer ever…until he finds a hidden chamber filled with the journals and equipment of Victorian-era ghost-hunter, August Potts.
When he's finally allowed out of the house, Paul befriends two classmates as mysterious as they are monochromatic. Mischievous Shinji only wears black, and soft-spoken Andrea is always in pink. They’ve all got one thing in common: they’re obsessed with ghosts.
Seeing an opportunity, Paul and his new friends go into business as paranormal investigators and discover, to their delight, something they’re truly good at: solving cases! The Case of the Playroom Poltergeist. The Exorcism of the Stuffed Opossum. The Mysterious Business in the Funeral Home Walls.
As they dust off antique gadgets to pursue their spectral sleuthing, they realize an even more sinister mystery is afoot. People around town are vanishing, and someone—or some thing—is responsible.
Can Paul crack the puzzle, save his new home, and decide what kind of person he wants to be—before it’s too late?
HOW TO HANDLE A HAUNTING is a spooky MG novel that answers the question, “What if Encyclopedia Brown and his friends were Ghostbusters?” It’s my second novel, complete at 52k words, written as a stand-alone book with series potential. Readers familiar with Kate Milford’s Greenglass House series or Lora Senf’s The Clackity will find similar elements in my work.
My debut MG novel, Maybe There Are Witches (Fitzroy Books, 2023), was longlisted for the Bram Stoker Award and named a Society of Midland Authors honoree. I’ve been a community college professor for twenty years, teaching public speaking and media literacy, but I’m best known as the creator of viral memes like “Tilda Swinton as Libraries.” I have a modest platform, with 25k followers across my social media.
I’ve included the first five pages below. Thanks for your time and consideration!
First Five Pages
Chapter 1
At lunchtime, the Plumbum Middle School cafeteria smelled like disinfectant and ketchup. Every day, Paul Salazar kept to himself, hoping that no one would bother him. Every day, he heard whispers around him. Every day, he knew the other students talked about him, but seldom to him.
“Did you know?”
“Well, I heard—”
“He’s a convicted criminal.”
“He’s the world’s best computer hacker.”
“He’s from Chicago!”
Paul sat alone, peeled the crust off his sandwich, and chewed as though it required every bit of his attention. The things people said weren’t true…not all of them. He wasn’t the world’s best computer hacker. He was just a reasonably decent hacker.
And he wasn’t technically a convicted criminal—sure, he’d committed crimes, but the correct term (because of his age) was juvenile delinquent.
He had, however, moved to Plumbum from Chicago over the summer. That part was true.
Paul liked solving problems, and he’d decided on the first day of school that his best response to the whispering was no response at all. If I don’t give them anything to talk about, he reasoned, they’ll get bored eventually. His strategy was somewhat successful—after just a few minutes, the other kids in the lunchroom turned their attention away from Paul. They talked to each other, or they played games on their phones.
Paul wasn’t allowed to have a phone. He wasn’t allowed to have a lot of things, because of the incident, so when he finished his sandwich, he pulled out a book. It was a very special book, bound in black leather, and although there was no title on the cover, a number was painted on its spine: 21.
He read quietly and soon lost himself in the pages, until someone yanked the book out of his hands.
“What’s this?!” said Rich Gross, the meanest kid in school. He was taller and broader than Paul and tended to laugh at things that weren’t funny. “Why are you always reading?!?”
Paul’s ears turned red. “Give it back!” he said, though his voice wasn’t very loud.
“This is hand-written!” Rich said. “Are you actually reading somebody’s diary?” One of Rich’s friends, Jason, a boy from the wrestling team who was shorter and thicker, stood behind him and snickered.
“Give it back!” Paul repeated. He held out his hand.
Rich ignored him, turned back a few pages to the beginning of the journal entry Paul had been reading, then proclaimed in an exaggerated Scandinavian accent, “The Ghost in the Yellow Barn. In which I successfully detect and extinguish a malevoylent…” Rich butchered the word malevolent. “A mall-ev-voy-lee-ent apparition.” He smirked. “Is this what criminals like you read every day?! Is this why you don’t have any friends?”
Paul stiffened and his eyes twitched. It was true; he didn’t have any friends in his new town. Somehow, it hurt more to hear someone say it out loud.
Some of the other students in the cafeteria watched with interest to see how this scene would play out. Some pretended not to notice. And some just ignored Rich’s cruel behavior as if they were used to it.
Rich turned to the first page. “An Account of the Mysteries of the Unseen, the Hidden, and the World of Spirits, Spectres, and Ghosts, Part 21.”
On the opposite side of the room, a boy dressed in black, with jagged black hair, glanced up from his tray. His sharp eyes flicked toward the commotion. Sitting beside him, a blonde girl in a bubblegum-pink sweatshirt paused mid-sip of her juice box. She leaned in and cocked her head at the boy, as if to say, Did you hear that?
“Did your grandpa write this ghost stuff?” Rich sneered. “Maybe that’s why you’re so weird.”
Paul was mortified. “Give it back, please.” This was his only copy, and he worried what Rich might do to it. Paul felt tears coming, so he took a deep breath.
Suddenly, Mr. Cellier appeared. The newest teacher at Plumbum Middle School, he taught Paul's second-period geometry class. He’d been hired over the summer when the previous math teacher, Mr. Bunker, left suddenly to get married in Florida.
Mr. Cellier was also the youngest-looking teacher at the school, and behind his back some students called him a hipster and made fun of him for wearing suspenders and rolling his shirt sleeves up to his elbows. Now, he folded his arms across his chest, hooked his thumbs under his suspenders, and looked from Paul to Rich.
“What’s going on here, boys?”
Rich stood up straight. “I was just checking out this cool book that Paul brought.” He sounded so earnest it was as if he was mocking Mr. Cellier, too.
“May I see that?” Mr. Cellier took the book from Rich. He looked briefly at the handwritten pages and then at the spine.
“In the future, Mr. Gross, perhaps you should ask before you take other people’s things. Now, why don’t you run along to your next class, which—if I’m not mistaken—is my class.” Rich started to say something, but Mr. Cellier shushed him and waved him away.
“Mr. Salazar,” he said, turning to Paul and handing him the journal, “this looks like a very old book. If it’s important to you, perhaps it will be safest at home and not in a middle school cafeteria. Do you understand?”
Paul nodded and zipped the book into his worn brown backpack as Mr. Cellier walked away.
The next day, Paul did not bring a book to school. Once again, he sat by himself in the lunchroom, but he ate only half of his lunch. As he was getting ready to leave, the blonde girl, now in a pink sweater and pink sneakers, walked by his table and placed a folded piece of pink paper in front of him. He looked at her. He recognized her—she was the girl in the back row of his life science class who never said a word. She nodded and walked back to her table, where the boy with black hair sat eating sweet potato fries.
Paul opened the note. It was unsigned, but in neat cursive handwriting it said, _If you’re interested in ghosts, you should sit at our table!___
Paul looked over at the girl and the boy, so mismatched they looked out of place even in a room full of kids their age. They talked quietly to each other and Paul felt that they were intentionally not looking his way. He wondered about the note, strangely formal but also somehow comforting. You should sit at our table!
The next day, and every day after that, he did.
Chapter 2
Today was the sixteenth or seventeenth meeting of the Plumbum Ghost Club. No one was really sure.
Paul Salazar was late. He hadn’t planned on being late, and he didn’t expect anyone to be upset. The ghost club had only two other members, and they were now his two best friends. Nevertheless, Paul liked to be punctual.
“Put on a jacket!” his mom yelled as he headed out the door. Ms. Salazar had dark hair and brown eyes. They looked almost exactly like the brown eyes Paul rolled in response.
“But it’s spring!”
“No buts. It’s only technically spring. It’s still chilly.”
Paul slipped a blue jacket onto his skinny frame and picked up his backpack. His wavy brown hair was already tucked into his lucky hat, a gray baseball cap with a black circle on the crown. Paul wore it absolutely everywhere (except at school, where he had to put it in his back pocket because wearing hats indoors wasn’t allowed).
“If you need me, call me from the Howletts’ landline,” his mom said. Paul still wasn’t allowed to have a cell phone, even though he was almost thirteen. Paul was annoyed by this, but it wasn’t his mom’s fault—it was part of his plea agreement.
“Okay.”
“Love you, Paul.”
“Love you too, Mom.” He rushed out the door before he could be stopped again. He made his way along a narrow neighborhood sidewalk, walking fast but not quite running past colorful two- and three-story houses with gabled roofs and round turrets decorated with curlicues of gingerbread trim. Some houses stood behind wrought iron gates, and in the morning light the shadows of metal whorls and old calligraphy decorated their lawns. Many of the homes in Paul’s neighborhood had ivy climbing at least one wall.
Paul loved this part of town. Here, every house looked like a haunted house.