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.”
— ★★★★★ Readers’ Favorite
Cannibalism, rape, murder—just a few of the ways love is love inside Safe Dome Austin. And though Simon has managed to avoid all but one—rape, obviously—by secluding himself inside the same Safe Space for hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours, a disagreement with the Institute's AI, Google, over which dress looks best on his Shell escalates into jealousy, and she locks him out—not just from his preferred Safe Space, but from every Safe Space on his Safe Block.
What follows is a neon-drenched, blood-soaked fever dream of paranoia, survival, and intrigue inside the metal walls of a dystopian world where everyone is finally free to do whatever they want, identify however they want—and where having a problem with that means being picked apart for the ingredients in Safe McDonald’s classic, the Safe Big Mac.
Described by readers as the “logical conclusion to our current society” and the “True Detective: Season One of novels,” MOTIVE BLACK is a satirical, Kafkaesque horror show. The first in a four-part jaunt into hell, journey through the kind of Sodom and Gomorrah only the 21st century could promise, and bear witness to one seriously fvcked up man’s desperate struggle to break free from the Safety every scientist across the globe agrees is all that separates us from the hatred of white people and the dying world outside.
CONTENT WARNING: This book contains graphic depictions of violence and sex. It features pervasive drug use, obscene language, and torture. Reader discretion is advised.
