2024 PenCraft Book Awards — Runner-up, General Fiction

"Surreal, shocking, and beautifully disorienting—Motive Black conjures a world that feels too close to our own."

5 Stars — Readers' Favorite

The motive for evil is black.

The Subject lives inside Safe Dome Austin, a steel world governed by the Institute and watched over by Google, an artificial intelligence enforcing the dogma of Love, Safety, and Happiness.

For countless hours, he has hidden inside a Safe Space, avoiding the rape, murder, cannibalism, and other sanctioned acts of Love waiting beyond its walls. But when an argument with Google over which dress looks best on his Shell ends in jealousy, she locks him out of every Safe Space on his block.

Forced into the neon-drenched corridors, the Subject confronts horror after horror. Every attempt to survive lowers his Safety Rating, pushing him closer to the Institute's remedy for anyone deemed unsafe.

With nowhere left to turn, Ana, an Institute researcher, offers him a way out through her experiment—but only if he is willing to break the Institute's rules and marry her.

As Ana sets about transforming him into a better husband, the Subject begins receiving letters from an unseen author warning that his wife is not what she seems—and telling him how to deal with her. Caught between Ana's insistence that he become the man she wants and the violence the letters demand, he must decide which voice to trust before something worse decides for him.

Grotesque, transgressive, and darkly funny, Motive Black begins a four-part, Kafkaesque dystopian horror series blending savage social satire, psychological disintegration, and body horror—the story of a man who escapes one system of control only to be claimed by another and groomed for an end as horrific as it is unimaginable.

CONTENT WARNING: This novel contains graphic sex, sexual violence, extreme violence, torture, pervasive drug use, and obscene language. Listener discretion is advised.