THE MOTIVE FOR EVIL
IS BLACK.

Adam Scott Huerta's award-winning first novel explores mankind's degradation as a pivotal Subject unwittingly carves out the path to Hell.

The Subject lives inside Safe Dome Austin, an absurd steel world governed by the Institute and watched over by Google, an A.I. maintaining the dogma of Love, Safety, and Happiness. After an argument about what dress to wear with Google leaves him locked out of his preferred Safe Space, he is forced into the tangled corridors of Safe Block (#), where acts of Love—rape, murder, cannibalism—wait at every corner.

As he is confronted with one horror after another, every choice the Subject makes to survive lowers his Safety Rating, pushing him ever closer to the Institute’s final remedy for anyone deemed unsafe. With nowhere left to turn, he is given a second chance by Ana, a mysterious Institute researcher who existed only in his dreams. She offers him a way out through her experiment, but only at the cost of breaking the Institute’s rules—marrying her. While torn between his own desire for Happiness and his new wife’s insistence that he be a better husband, he begins receiving letters from an unseen author, warning him Ana isn’t what she seems—and how best to deal with her. Can he trust what the letters tell him, or does Ana really mean it when she says, “No, I’m not mad"?

Grotesque, transgressive, and darkly funny, Motive Black is the first installment in a four-part dystopian dive into the heart of darkness: the bizarre, mesmerizing odyssey of a man groomed into a fate he never chose, consumed by revenge, and hurtling toward an end as horrific as unimaginable.