Valentina Sainato

I’ve been with JABberwocky Literary Agency since early 2020, and I’m looking for fresh, enticing fiction in sf/f/h genres!

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Horror: Horror is my favorite genre to read, and I’m looking for lots of different flavors here. Whether it’s spooky, eerie, disorienting, thrilling, existential, or horror-lite, I want to read it. Blends with sci-fi/fantasy are also welcome, but the book should still feel at home on the horror shelf!

I particularly love stories featuring ghosts, haunted houses, monsters, witches, and demons, but I really want to see fresh takes on them with unexpected twists. Other elements I enjoy: body horror, cults or secret societies, natural phenomena like fungi and flora, and settings that make me feel claustrophobic. But what I mainly look for in a horror book are well-developed characters I can root for — or, alternatively, characters whose wrongs I can get behind.

While I tend to gravitate more to supernatural or suspenseful horror over serial killers, I do like self-aware homages to slasher & cult films (like Stephen Graham Jones’ brilliant My Heart is a Chainsaw). Survival horror or horror with thriller elements are also sub-genres that I like but don’t read as often.

Horror media I love: 

• Books: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix, My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones, Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, The Route of Ice and Salt by José Luis Zárate, The Honeys by Ryan La Sala, Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White
• Film/TV: Get Out, Scream, Ringu/The Ring, Hereditary, I Saw the TV Glow, Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House
• Other media: video games like Oxenfree and Slay the Princess, podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale and The Magnus Archives

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Fantasy: I’m eager to see projects from all different cultures and histories, particularly non-Western and non-European stories! Character- and world-building are a big priority for me in fantasy and mythology projects. One of my biggest pet peeves is when a manuscript jumps right into the plot when I don’t have a clear sense of who I’m reading about and why I should invest in these stakes.

For fantasy, I lean more towards the contemporary side of things but am open to secondary-world fantasies with a unique premise as well. Lush atmospheric settings and fresh magic systems mean more to me than swords & sorcery or Chosen One books. Cozy or soft fantasy is also very welcome in my query box (a la Legends & Lattes, Over the Garden Wall, or Studio Ghibli). And while I’m not looking for romantasy, I am generally open to romantic elements or romance as a B-plot.

With mythology and folklore, I’m most excited by fiction that draws on a specific tale or lore and shapes it into its own story. Whether it’s a close retelling or loose adaptation, I want to be sucked in by how fresh and unexpected the world seems, even if it’s mythology or folklore I know very well.

Fantasy/mythology media I love: 

• Books: The Song of Achilles and Circe by Madeline Miller, The Singing Hills Cycle series by Nghi Vo, Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez, The House on the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune, Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree, Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas
• Film/TV: Spirited Away, Pan’s Labyrinth, Avatar the Last Airbender & The Legend of Korra, Over the Garden Wall, The Owl House

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Science fiction / speculative fiction: I’m more selective about science fiction and speculative fiction; I’m a big character reader and want stories with an emotional core that drives them. I was absolutely blown by Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark as well as Simon Jimenez’s The Vanished Birds; projects in those vein are what I’d love to work on. I also love narratives that play with time and/or space. Sci-fi books that deep dive into spaceship mechanics or battle sequences generally are not for me.

I also like reading more grounded contemporary books that have a speculative or off-beat twist such as Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks. Absurdity is also welcome but it has to mesh well with the voice, like in Hilary Mantel’s Temporary.

Sci-fi / speculative media I love: 

• Books: How High We Go In the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu, The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez, Exhalation by Ted Chiang, A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, Private Rites by Julia Armfield, Temporary by Hilary Leichter, We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry
• Film/TV: Everything Everywhere All At Once, Severance, The Twilight Zone, Gravity Falls
• Other media: video games like I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, Outer Wilds, and Neo Cab

Submission Guidelines

To query Valentina, please submit your query letter and the first fifteen pages of your completed manuscript through the online form at https://querymanager.com/query/ValentinaSainato .

Guidelines & Details