Querying weird

Oh honorable QOTKU,

De-lurking here to ask a question that's been making my brain itch for the past few weeks: how do you query something weird? What do you do with a square peg that doesn't fit the "protagonist faced with a choice" hole?

For example, I recently re-read Max Brooks' World War Z. It's a phenomenal book that was wildly successful, but depending on how you look at it, the protagonist is either all of humanity or the roughly fifty subjects whose interviews make up the book. No one makes a significant choice to set up the story; it's sparked by an outside influence that everyone must react to. No character is involved in more than twenty pages of story. And to make things even more difficult, the most recent reasonably well-known example of its oral history style is a history book over thirty years old.

World War Z is a textbook example of breaking the rules done right, and I'm sure the pages sold it immediately. But how do you write a query that says "I know this breaks the rules, but I do it well and it's the right choice for this story," especially when you can't build from a base of "protagonist X is presented with decision Y?" Where does one even begin a pitch that makes you want pages on something like this?

Using your example of World War Z, here's the description lifted from the ebook edition:

We survived the zombie apocalypse, but how many of us are still haunted by that terrible time? We have (temporarily?) defeated the living dead, but at what cost? Told in the haunting and riveting voices of the men and women who witnessed the horror firsthand, World War Z, a #1 New York Times bestseller and the basis for the blockbuster movie, is the only record of the plague years.

Take out the last part of that and you've got something that works just fine as a query:

We survived the zombie apocalypse, but how many of us are still haunted by that terrible time? We have (temporarily?) defeated the living dead, but at what cost? Told in the haunting and riveting voices of the men and women who witnessed the horror firsthand, World War Z, a #1 New York Times bestseller and the basis for the blockbuster movie, is the only record of the plague years. is X words by Y author.

If you break all the rules, and do it  well, I'll get it. The trick is of course doing it well. How do you know if you have? Give your query to someone you know who likes to read (not necc your crit group which is trained to find problems.)

When that person is done reading, ask if they'd want to read the book. Yes is good, no is not. Lather, rinse, repeat till you're ahead of the game.

You learn the rules not just to follow them blindly but to know what is breaking them and what isn't. Breaking rules isn't a deal breaker. Bad writing is a deal breaker.