by Marta Pérez Fernández (@notonlyicarus.bsky.social)
MG Horror
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Query
I’m delighted to share KNOWING THE TWINS, a 69,000-word Middle Grade Horror novel with crossover potential. It explores different responses to trauma, strictly gendered childhood experiences, and the bargains we make to survive the things that hurt us. KNOWING THE TWINS is a stand-alone with multiple first-person POVs.
This book combines the adult-free environment and emergency hierarchy of LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding, the internally-driven conflict and revelatory abuse of THE WRONG WAY HOME by Kate O’Shaughnessy, and the psychological stakes of NOT QUITE A GHOST by Anne Ursu.
It’s summer in 1920s New England. Eight children between 6-14 years old are dropped off by their parents at a family friend’s estate for the summer. There is a lake, a forest, and the Manor House, sitting at the center of it all. There don’t seem to be any adults—everyone answers to fourteen-year-old Alistair.
Quentin is a peacemaker. He can defuse any social situation. He’s gracious and clever, he takes too much responsibility for things, and he has no doubt he’ll sail by this summer, chatting to these kids he’s just met. There’s responsible Constance, glamorous Christelle, cheerful Vita, nervous Jacob, and boisterous little Hugh. And then there’s Alistair—the man, or boy, of the house, and his younger brother, delicate Alexander.
Alistair ropes the children into wildly inventive games. But, as time passes, Alistair’s domineering personality grows into something darker, something with teeth. He commands everything, it seems; even the old house’s long shadows and his little brother’s every word. The phone lines are cut and there are no neighbors for miles. It starts to seem like Alistair wants the children to get hurt. Some try to run away. Some try to fight. Some try to freeze. Some try to fawn. Peacemaker Quentin steps in. He’s the only one who can get through to Alistair—who can stand close enough to understand him. Because he’s not always cruel… Sometimes he’s caring, and sometimes he even begs for forgiveness. This disturbing duality earns him the nickname “the twins”. As long as Quentin can predict him, the others might escape Alistair’s control and make it through the summer in one piece. But can understanding ever be enough? As the children start to break down and Alistair’s games cross the point of no return, Quentin starts to realise that even if he makes it out alive, he may never see himself the same way again.
I am a 27-year-old aspiring Middle Grade author and part-time published academic. Having grown up a third-culture kid feeling both everywhere and nowhere, stories are how I’ve bridged the gaps and understood the worlds I’ve found myself in. This manuscript won the #RevPit (Revise and Resubmit) 2025 competition and has undergone a full developmental edit. I would be thrilled to provide you with the full manuscript upon request.
CONTENT WARNINGS: abandonment, psychological manipulation, blood, implied violence, light body horror
First Five Pages
Prologue
Out of all the stories that he told us over that endless summer, this is the one that comes back to me the most.
Crocodiles, he said, are some of the fiercest, most ferocious hunters out there, but they have one weakness. Know their weakness, he would say, face lit with dancing flames from below, shadows stretching across skin. In that tone of his. Like milk on the point of curdling. Like a honeyed sweet in your mouth turning sour, spat out to reveal the wasp, still twitching, at its centre. His too-wide smile, too many teeth, a crocodile in stagnant water.
I’m getting ahead of myself again. Sorry.
Crocodiles, he said. One weakness. A finger held up, muddied from the day, like an offering. The little group of us huddling that little bit closer, drawn despite ourselves, despite something deeper than disgust which screamed to run. It was never any use. He was an evolutionary mistake. You knew what he could do. You knew that he was doing it. You still leaned in to see it, as your skin began to melt back, as you smelled the charred flesh of it, dirtying the air.
Crocodiles lay eggs in the dirt on riverbanks, but they were slow and stupid on solid ground, so protecting their eggs was a constant gamble. Above, the sun bloody, uncaring, as it began to bake the crocodile from the inside out. Predators waited, smiling, in the leafy shadows, for the crocodile to make the ultimate choice. Ensure the survival of their offspring, or save themselves. All the while feeling their skin begin to crackle. Their blood start, steadily, to boil.
In my dreams, I see the crocodiles, their slimy blinks slowing, lying in a puddle of unrelenting sunlight, limbs numbing. In my dreams, as they lie over their clutch of eggs, they can sense tiny twitches of movement beneath, within; as they begin to die, they feel their young and know that their corpse will not deter the hungry teeth in the shadows for long.
Mother, the eggs seem to recognise, bundling close.
The crocodile dies. The feast begins.
The crocodile’s weakness is having their eggs in an environment they can’t survive in. No way to defend against predators.
In my dreams, I admit to myself what I can’t do awake. That’s not how he told the story. In his story, the crocodile tries to save the eggs and dies, or doesn’t. Either way, the predator comes. He said it into the woodsmoke, into the dying day, to our tired, hungry faces. He said it with a look like the gleam on the butcher’s knife, rusted with time and innards. He said it looking at me. What he said was, “The crocodiles’ weakness is that they need to survive.”
Chapter 1 : Debut
Quentin
I’m on a train, and it’s entirely my fault.
I’m sure you and I would disagree on where this story starts. I’ll begin with where I came into it.
It started with a lie.
“I really don’t mind,” I told Mom, and “I’ll be fine”, and she believed me because she really wanted to. It’s a good trick. I used it all the time.
“It’s awful understanding of you, darling”, she said. Her cheeks were pink as rosé. “Manny’s boat just won’t be a place for a responsible boy like you.”
“Benny’s boat,” I said.
She frowned at me with a little pout. “Benny’s. I know his name! It’s a grand adventure for you, anyways, all this larking about with children your age, no adults around. I wish!”
Her smile was sparkling. She did not wish. It was just a nice thing to say, as if her desire to go someplace ought to give me an idea of how desirable the place was.
I didn’t need it to be desirable. I was going whether I wanted to or not.
#
That’s what I’m doing now, on this train—going.
It’s a very nice train, or rather, a very nice first class carriage. Mom got me a good seat; soft green plush, like sitting on ferns, and a table all to myself. Outside, the world is rolling by. Inside, everything is still. Even the hot chocolate inside my cup isn’t swaying from the motion of the train. Hot chocolate on demand—the best carriage, said Mom, for my best boy. She was dressed for her summer-long boat trip when she said it, Benny’s shiny new car parked in the driveway.
I’m not complaining (I try not to do that), but surely if there’s one place you can be honest, it’s in your own head where no one else can hear you. I don’t hate that Mom sent me away for the summer. A house, a lake, other children, no parents—it was Mom’s friends’ idea to go on a boat trip together, a no-children sort of trip, so anyone with children is sending their children to the St Albyn’s house for the summer.
My mother always likes me better when I only just got home from school, so it’s for the best that we’ll be apart this summer. She cried saying goodbye, of course, because that’s what mothers do, and she wants her new boyfriend Benny to find her motherly.
Not that I think she’s faking all of it. She’s not cold, or anything. She just likes theatrics, and especially likes using theatrics to get what she wants. “Think of the picture,” is how she puts it, when it’s just us and she has a bit to drink and I get her talking.
No more of that. I get to put away my Mom Management Manual. She calls me her “little helper”—“little” because she doesn’t like that I’m fourteen and growing up. Unless it’s useful to her, like when she is sending me away with no adult supervision. You’re responsible, Mom said cheerfully, and you’re fourteen. You manage yourself better than I do! They don’t need to hire a nanny.
I smile despite myself. She does hate being responsible for things.
I sip my chocolate. Does it feel freeing, speeding away from her, or just disconcerting to lose all my reference points?
When to keep her talking. When to change the subject. When to be breezy, and when to push until she feels heard enough to actually tell me what’s wrong. I don’t use it while I’m away at school, of course, but I spend the month of May gearing up to spend the summer as Mom’s emotional translator. Now, unused, that prep hangs in the air, uncertain, unspent, nervous energy with nowhere to go.
It’s about time I get a minute to myself, I suppose, but I like people. I like reading them and seeing what I find. Most people have never really been listened to; once you listen, they give you reference points like grateful gifts, so if you’re into drawing maps, you can sketch one out faster than you’d think. People want to be understood. If you prove you want to, they jump at the chance.
Usually. Listen to me, talking as if I’m some mastermind of the human.. well, mind. I’m not, but it’s a whole lot easier to make people happy if you understand what they want and why. And it’s a whole lot easier to be happy if you know how to keep other people happy. You know?
I’ve been alone all of two hours and I miss people. The loud and the strange, the cacophony—“a hard, discordant mixture of sounds”, sorry, I’m not sure yet if you like big words—that starts to grow rhythm and melody if you stand back far enough, or close enough, or you know how to read it. I don’t usually have time to myself, so I know how to listen long enough to know where I stand.
With no one but me here, I guess there is no one to listen to but me. Harder to work out where I stand. Sit.
The carriage door opens, a soft, buttery sound. A cart is trying to wrestle its way inside. It’s the sweet seltzer cart, the fizzy kind they usually don’t give you unless you look old enough. The soft carpet, the wheels—they’re going to catch. The space before the carriage is far more jolty than the inside of it.
Behind the carriage, the muttering sound of someone who is paid not to swear out loud.
I’m on my feet. I wave a little, so the cart man isn’t startled. He frowns bushy eyebrows down at me, eyebrows that say, I’m not in the mood to deal with kids right now.
“Good afternoon,” I say, shoulders straight and smile kind, “there’s a bend coming up. Can I help you lift the cart in?”
“Go on then,” he says. I let him decide when to heave the cart up away from the carpet, just enough that it slides into the carriage.
I set my side of the cart down very softly. The man slips in. He’s wearing the green uniform of the train worker who handed me the hot chocolate earlier and called me sweetie.
“Jolly good help,” he says.
I nod and smile, and sit back in my seat. I don’t slide in; I sit, like a man with a briefcase would. I go to pick up my hot chocolate, the move easy, since there isn’t much of it left.
Inside the carriage, there really is no motion at all. The man pushes the cart with ease.
When he gets to my side, he peers down at me properly. My hair has just a touch of pomade in it to keep the wave right. My clothes are neat.
“Say,” he starts, “you wouldn’t want any of this seltzer?”
I wait until he rolls the cart past the carriage to smile. I sip my seltzer. It’s delicious.
I don’t hate that I’m going away for the summer. I hate the cold pit in my stomach, though. It’s rare, and sharp, like my body is bracing for something. I don’t usually mind new things. I do dislike plans being changed on me, or maybe I just dislike the casual smile with which my mother changes a plan.
The stomach pit is new. It sends cold tendrils snaking up into my chest.
Bodies are smart. Smarter than brains. They notice far more than we realise, and my stomach has been noticing something for days that my brain hasn’t caught up with yet.
#
It’s very important that you know that nothing at all is wrong with the house.
The Manor House, when the car rumbles up to it, does not look or feel like an open mouth, teeth glinting placidly in the breeze. It looks old and very grand, and the air is a bit close, so you keep having to catch your breath, but it’s just that—a grand old Manor House. It looks to me a bit too delicate a house to leave your children in alone for the summer. Unless there is going to be a lot of reading.
I’m paying close attention, of course, when I step down, but I don’t feel it. I know I don’t, because it surprises me, later, once the teeth start to sink in.
The house feels a bit taut, maybe. Like a held breath. That’s it.
I make my way up the steps, pulling my trunk with me. I knock the heavy brass knocker against the front door. It opens inward.
#
Constance
When they told us, old Manor House, I didn’t know what to expect.
Obviously, I knew what to expect, architecture wise—that’s just historical fact. Dad said it was Victorian, end-of-the-century, and post-Civil War. A fifty year old house, then, sixty at most. That’s older than our terrace house. In fact, it’s probably the oldest house I’ve ever stayed at. Most of my friends live in terraced houses or in apartments if they’re from the city, solid chocolate and terracotta-colored brownstones. Nothing like this.
The grounds are huge—it takes at least twenty minutes to drive from the road up to the house. And the house itself is large. Bigger—significantly bigger—than I expected. It’s built with an English Victorian country house eye, I think. Grey stone and grey brick, half-devoured by ivy in bloom. My sister catches her breath at it, of course. She’ll be making notes for her future house. Houses, plural. Or scheming to somehow keep this one.
She heard the boy whose parents’ house this is— who’ll be hosting us during our parents’ summer trip— is fourteen, and she’s been sly and silent ever since. I hate that expression of hers, gleeful and self-important, like she knows a secret she won’t discuss unless you know it, too. She’s too young to know anything at all, and too stubborn to care. She’s only thirteen, for goodness’ sake. Two years younger than me, and believe me, it shows. She’ll make a fool of herself, and I’ll have to watch.
She doesn’t care, of course. She likes spectacles. She knows that life has made her the star of the show, and she might as well play the part. She enjoys it. Not a single thought in that empty head, I tell you.
Anyway. Gravel driveway, shockingly green trees, the air of a hidden lake somewhere thick in the air, so it must be rather a big one. Fantastic. Kiddies and water and a lack of supervision. I’m going to be just run off my feet.
I briefly thought this would be an actual holiday, but with no parents around, I’m going to be the one making sure everyone is safe. And nobody likes a party pooper. Hopefully the St Albyns hired a good governess, but even so, I’ll be shocked if I have a minute to myself.
That’s what it is, to be an older sister, I suppose. It’s always your job to make sure everyone else is all right first. Would I like to have a good old trudge around this forest, alone, just me and my welly boots? Of course. Would I like to sketch or read in the shade by the lake? Probably. Find out more about the history, lounge around, discover a new hobby? What a dream. That’s all it’s going to be— just a dream. I’m the oldest one here, older than our host, even. This summer is going to be about handling children, my sister among them.