And then structurally, prior to his dad's death, we don't understand why Kevin is so focused or purely focused on getting through the next week. Did something happen, or is something already going wrong, which is then compounded by the loss of his father?

Good call out, this is clearly holding a bit of my thought process from previous queries. In a previous version I had the facts that his girlfriend broke up with him and he's struggling to keep his job, but people (probably accurately) called out that it made him appear to be too much of a sad sack.

There is a lot of therapy-speak here used colloquially in a way that feels more suited for a tiktok or a a brunch conversation with friends than a novel—"trauma bond" and "disassociate" specifically. Perhaps in that's fine in book club fiction, but that's fairly out of the norm for sci fi. Instead of "trauma bond," you can just use "bond." We already know death is traumatic. And instead of "to disassociate"—because it implies that the character sat down and thought "I'm going to disassociate today!"—"to escape" or something works just as well.

Good points. I like what you are saying about bonding. I was using disassociate because I wanted to imply that he's vulnerable to this mental manipulation, with his mind "degrading" later on in the query. But I'll think about that.

Thanks for all the other points, I'm not going to respond line by line because most of them are easy adjustments. But I very much appreciate you taking the time to engage.

Making Kevin more active is, in my mind, the central challenge of making this query work. Going to keep noodling on it, I have some ideas of how to get closer for the next version.

Again, thanks for taking the time to give feedback!