“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
- Pablo Neruda
An agents guide to:
Every Bright Thing
by Daniel Sheen
Below is an agents guide for the forthcoming YA / Crossover trilogy, including an artist statement, praise from beta readers, a spoiler-free 500-word synopsis and a two page excerpt from Chapter One.
Genre: Queer Literary YA / Crossover
Secondary genres: M/M Romance / Adventure / Mystery
Word Count:
Book 1 - 180k
Book 2 - 125k
Book 3 - 180k
Comps: Huck Finn / A Little Life / Demon Copperhead / This Is Not a Love Story
Secondary Comps: Mysterious Skin / Compound Fracture / Don't Let The Forest In / The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things
TV / Film Comps: Stand by Me / The Outsiders / Close / Mud / Jet Boy / Mid90s / Kids / Breaking Bad
Truthful comp: it's not really like any of those comps. It's kinda out there on it's own, and I'm not just saying that. I read an average of eighty five books a year and I've never come across anything like it.
Vibes and Tropes: 1990s / Slow burn / Appalachian / Queer / Coming of age / Small town weirdness / Sinister nature vibes / Boys own adventure / Epic tragedy / Lyrical maximalism Modern fairytale / Friends to lovers / Childhood neglect / Misfit indie kids / Teenage runaways Character driven anxiety coded / Addiction issues / Transgressive / Missing kids / Road trip Youth homelessness / Mental health / Found family / Be Gay Do Crime / Californian Cults Creeping dread / Climate collapse / Healing from trauma / Devastating heartbreak / Ultimately life affirming
Synopsis
In the decaying Appalachian town of Burnt Ridge, West Virginia, during the 1990’s, fifteen-year-old Daniel exists on society’s margins. Scarred by his mother’s death and his best friend’s disappearance, he’s resigned to a life of isolation. But when newcomer Lucas abruptly arrives at school, the two boys form an immediate and intense connection. Lucas however, is under the brutal control of a man named Nate Pitchford, an ex-convict and meth cook, who’s on the run from both a vicious drug cartel and a mysterious, shadowy organization called The Network. So over the next eighteen months, as Lucas slowly and reluctantly opens up about his shocking past, Daniel becomes increasingly consumed by his need to get Lucas to safety at all costs, and eventually, as the violence draws to a head, the two boys are forced to hit the road, embarking on a desperate cross-country adventure against a backdrop of civil unrest and climate collapse.
Their journey across America via the great plains and the neon chaos of Las Vegas, finally ends on the blood-soaked streets of Los Angeles, and what begins as an escape, turns into a desperate fight for survival, a fight which will test their loyalty, courage, and even their understanding of what it means to be alive. Will the boys learn to survive on the streets of a hostile city? Will they find the home and family they’ve always longed for? Will Lucas ever learn the awful truth of where he came from? Why is there no record of his birth? And did he really murder his father before leaving Burnt Ridge?
As the two boys navigate LA’s treacherous criminal underworld, they’re aided by an unlikely crew of allies, including a trainee journalist, a Russian street kid, a Hollywood actress, a millionaire entrepreneur, a savage anarchist drug dealer from the Valley, and their two new friends, Jack and Kade, a couple of runaway pickpockets from Texas. Together, they navigate LA’s hazardous maze of slums, chop-shops, car lots, clubs, beaches and penthouses, all while confronting addiction, blinding heat, starvation, violent hobos, hostile gangs, deranged film stars, sorority houses, illegal raves, and their own traumatic pasts. But as the years turn, and their wealth, influence and sanity begin to spiral out of control, Daniel must face his most terrifying fear yet — that in saving Lucas from Nate, he might've actually lost him forever.
Set deep within a mystical American landscape shimmering with superstition and menace, Every Bright Thing exposes the devastating impact of addiction, abuse, and mental illness on vulnerable queer youth abandoned by an uncaring system. This visceral bildungsroman explores the beauty and brutality of the human experience, exploring how belief, hope, and art can transform even the most desperate of circumstances. Epic in scope yet intimate in focus, Every Bright Thing is both a maximalist love story and a tragic modern fairytale — an unflinching portrait of two teen boys fighting to create their own definitions of family, safety and home, in a world determined to destroy them.
“I think every book should take risks, and be experimental to a certain
extent, and if you're not, then you're letting the form down,”
- Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life.
Excerpt from Chapter One
THE LAST DAYS OF SUMMER always bring trouble. The glaring sky, a mean and spreading thing, light-streaky and dangerous. The white-baking heat, sticky as a loyal dog’s panting, everything smeared with flies. Ain’t nothin’ gentle out here, the sunlight fierce enough to peel the skin off your thoughts, the dry wind bitter with the stench of rotting metal. But even as the air slumps heavy through the trees, time circles back to that one frost-bitten night what bent my whole life crossways. Just thinkin’ on that night makes me turn wrong inside, like an unfinished murder ballad, my stomach filled with rage. Because time don’t always feel like a gift, and in the years that followed, time made me an empty boy, a creature made from nothin’ more than black coffee grounds and cigarette ash, my fragile heart stuffed into my chest like a dead fox in a shopping bag.
I'm having an episode, I know this, and a manic one at that, an anxious one, the worst one in a terrible series, like on one of them awful sitcoms (THE WORLDS WORST BOY), where everything dissolves into cringe and yet the laugh track goes on regardless. Although I guess it’s better than the Big Empty. Or the Grief Mountain. Shit, that motherfucker ain’t no laughing matter. I still don’t know how high it is and there ain’t no one offering to climb it with me.
Overhead, a red-tailed hawk cries once, sharp and lonely, but then falls silent. I’m almost there now, fighting through the trees that grab and snatch, kicking up a stomp past the high-voltage substation, past the fleabag motel, my eyes gone narrow on the field where it happened, my brain flooding with memories. Soft flesh meeting frozen soil. The biting stink of gas. The whisper of broken wings overhead.
The sorry patch of dirt where my mom died.
Sight of it freezes me solid, ‘cause there ain’t no way to view this cursed patch of ground without feelin’ bitter inside, the memory of that night like the devils’s fist squeezing my insides till I can’t hardly breathe for the choking of it. So now I’m mad-face starin’ at the broke motel, with its gap-toothed porch and rotting shutters. The wild mess of ferns punching tough through the fence.
Guess I’m tryna look at anythin’ other than the field where it happened.
Where my childhood ended.
So I’ve got this theory, right? How there must be certain moments, scattered throughout our lives, what change a person forever. No warning. No instruction manual. Just BAM! — life changed forever. ‘Cause in the four long years since the accident, it’s like I’ve been frozen in time, not some bratty kid anymore, but sure as hell not grown neither, like somethin’ caught between worlds. So I guess it made sense, when I first started livin’ in my head, as if the only way to deal with the madness of the world was to trouble it with make-believe. ‘Cause maybe that’s how we survive what can’t ever be undone. We create what never was, hoping it somehow fills the space of what can never be again. It’s basic mathematics. Cut out the part that burns, add some wishful thinking, and hope it somehow equals somethin’ you can live with.
Some folks might call that a coping mechanism. I call it survival.
Because I still think about that night. How quiet it got after the noise stopped. How the stars look different when you’re lying on your back in a field of broken glass. How long I waited before I understood that nobody was coming to help us. Although the shrink said it’s normal. Part of the process, he called it. Like grief is somethin’ you can finish, like homework, or washing the dishes.
And so the years roll by, and sure, the pain dulls somewhat, but I still get a bad taste in my mouth as I pass by — ash and lead and something like paint stripper. It don’t matter that years have passed since they winched our broken car through the fence and towed it away. It don’t matter that I’ve stomped this ground a thousand times, eyes downcast like I’m huntin’ for something, ‘cause here I am again, like I’m forever bearing witness, forever hoping to learn some sorta secret truth as to why things fell apart the way they did, like knowin’ the shape of it might make this tale my own, as if through ownership, I might finally understand.
"I'm interested in heartbreak as an experience that shapes the self and can illuminate larger existential truths about memory, grief, longing, desire, and abandonment."
- Madelaine Lucas
Full Artist Bio
Daniel Sheen is a queer artist and writer. He's obsessed with misfit indie boys, wilderness, folklore, modern fairy tales, homesickness for places that don't exist, and longing for things he can never have. His short works of fiction have been published in dozens of magazines worldwide, including XRAY Magazine, BLOOD + HONEY, Resurrection Mag, Queer Cumbria, DIF Writer's Zine, Stone of Madness Press, and the notorious SCAB MAG. His artwork has also featured in numerous international magazines, including a full-spread editorial in Black Flowers Magazine, and in 2025 he designed his very first book cover for Rebel Satori Press and is now in a secret collaboration with a teen fashion magazine. He's had Pushcart nominated stories published in two anthologies, one published by FILTHY LOOT in the US, and the other by RAM EYE PRESS in the UK. He's been nominated for the 2023 Pushcart Prize, Longlisted for the 2024 Uncharted Magazine Young Adult Award, Longlisted for the 2025 Caledonian First Novel Award and he's recently been nominated for the Best of the Net 2026 and selected for the inaugural Monarch Queer Literary Awards. He's currently editing a zine and writing his debut trilogy of novels.
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“The 'tragic flaw' is what makes tragedy so satisfying. Even if everyone dies, it feels like the
only possible outcome, because we felt it coming from the start.”
- M. L. Rio – author of If We Were Villains
Artist Statement
Every Bright Thing is not your regular young adult fare — it’s a book that doesn't apologize for being what it is. A mess of chaotic rage writhing in the shadows. Because there are some things in this world that are only seen clearly in the dark, just like there are certain types of pretty which can only emerge when the light falls elsewhere. Many novels thrive on minimalism. Almost every MFA textbook will tell you that keeping things spare lets the reader do the work. But I think there’s a truth in the opposite approach. And the unapologetic result of this truth is a story that serves as a ferocious reminder that not all forms of excess are negative. Because the way I see it, YA should be as hard to define as adolescence itself. After all, nothing is more full-tilt crazy than the years of our adolescence. This is why Every Bright Thing refuses to be another easily digestible retelling of familiar tropes designed for maximum profit.
The same complexity applies to fairy tales. Especially the original Grimm fables. They are unpredictable, gory and nuanced, often with a stubborn lack of redemption. Sometimes the kids are rewarded, but just as often, what the protagonists endure is so terrible, so life changing, that a happy ending feels almost meaningless, an inadequate response to an act of extraordinary survival. Every Bright Thing steals from the bones of the fairy tale while subverting their emotional landscape. Sure, there are young kids in trouble who have to face down the worst kind of scary all on their own, but there ain’t no mentors in this world, no wise old-folks, no grown-up saviours rushing in to save the day. And there ain’t no moralistic preaching either. The kids in my world have to save themselves in whatever way they can, they have to raise themselves up with guile, and grit, and violence. And yet, unlike a fairy tale, this book concerns itself more with the characters emotional response to these challenges. As such, I’ve attempted to merge the psychological specificity of contemporary literary fiction with the casual smart-mouth sarcasm of YA and the menacing yet dreamy quality of a fable.
In short, I wrote this novel for the confused, the lonely, the questioning, the neglected, the abused. This is for all those queer kids who ride skateboards and dirt bikes, who hunt and fish and run wild in the woods and start fights at school, who listen to Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails instead of Madonna. This book ain’t a novel, it’s a survival manual for a version of us that no one ever asked about. It's a trojan horse for everything I've never been able to say out loud. It's a story for every boy who's ever had to cover up bruises with make-up, even though there are way too many of us and I don't think I can ever reach them all. It's the novel I wished I could have read at sixteen, because for me, it turns out living with addiction was an appropriate response to being a child of trauma, and making room for grief through writing was my way of giving my heart the space it needed to heal.
As John Yorke points out when discussing the studies of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, it ain’t past blockbusters we should be focusing on, for every game-changing work of art is a Black Swan — something that no one saw coming or had ever conceived of before. Every Bright Thing aspires to be that unexpected emergence — a middle finger to a short-form tiktok world that’s making you feel disposable. And besides, the way I see it, all the best stories have a few things in common. They don't please everyone, not everyone survives, and everyone leaves changed.
PRAISE FROM BETA READER’S
Daniel’s book captures the magnitude of grief and addiction, the scarring nature of loss, and the unfathomable character of the emotional toll of trauma on the physical body. Daniel’s writing captures how memories can wash over you, drowning you in sensation, unstuck from time. It’s almost painterly, and it’s haunted, in the way paintings so often are. This story is a dreamy, panoramic portraiture of nihilism and escapism as the logical response to working class abjection - a volatile fever dream of two queer youths, who have nothing to lose, reacting to an uncaring world.
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M (Writer, Musician and Editor)
I honestly couldn’t put it down. In fact, I read most of what Daniel sent me twice. Lush, dreamy and evocative, this is one of those books that people will write fan fic about on AO3.
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J (Writer and poet)
A wrenchingly beautiful and unbearably sad look at abuse and its aftermath, told in an emotive fashion with bravery and honesty. This is a book that, although rendered in a loving, delicate hand, depicts ugly, despairing truths, dragging them out into the light, so that we can see them for what they are and work to prevent them.
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S (Conceptual artist)
Usually, I like books that move quickly and have tight plots and spare, functional prose. But sometimes I get lost in a book that is lyrical and poetic and meandering because it's just too beautiful to ignore. This was one of those books. Daniel’s tenacious refusal to cater to a specific audience is what makes this book so dynamic and original and exciting. This book might well turn out to be controversial, even polarizing, but to me, that only speaks to its poetic power.
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S (Musician)
There are certain books that so utterly evoke the depth of human emotions, that all the usual trappings of a good novel become secondary to the emotional landscape that the reader must traverse. This is a novel of sensory immersion. Right along with the characters I felt shame and weakness and guilt and angst, and the pain of childhood innocence being ripped away. This novel is both dream and lucid recollection, confessional and pleading.
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N (Writer and poet)
