Moogle Earth

For readers who loved The Circle and Black Mirror, comes a novel about the ultimate reality show-where the cameras never stop watching, and the real drama is the cost of being seen.

Willy Wunner is an airbag tester who has spent eleven years making sure things break correctly. Maya Kunz is a single mother drowning in debt, her eight-year-old daughter Babsi her only light. Both are selected to be the next "dream couple" on Dare to Say Yes!-a Moogle+ reality show offering two million dollars, a house, and a car to the strangers who can stay married on camera for one year.

But the script isn't what they signed up for. While the world watches, the line between fiction and reality begins to dissolve. What starts as a marriage of convenience becomes something else entirely, and when a failed actor with nothing to lose shows up at the wrong moment, a staged kidnapping goes catastrophically live.

Set in the unnerving near future of synthetic performers, AI-generated drama, and attention monetized down to the millisecond, Moogle Earth is a compelling portrait of a family that becomes a product-and of the men and women who write, produce, and moderate the product, unaware that the only honest face on the screen is the one the script never accounted for.

From the author: "The day after the pilot aired, someone in the writers' room asked how much engagement we would need to turn the drama into a real kidnapping. It was a joke. Then we did the numbers."

Moogle Earth is a novel about the people behind the screen, and the ones in front of it-told in one hundred and eight scenes, in the language of the future. Sometimes the show doesn't stop just because the cameras are off. Sometimes the audience leaves, but the family stays. And sometimes the real story is the one they didn't sell.