Today we reveal the cover to K. M. Szpara’s Docile, a tense science fiction novel about the grim future of debt. To be a Docile is to be owned, body and soul; to be a Docile is to sell your debt, and with it, your agency. Dociles enter the service of people of means, people whose pocket change could remake their whole family’s future, in order to escape generational debt. To make the service easier, these poor souls are offered Dociline, a seductive drug that turns off their minds and makes them happy, pliant slaves. But Elisha Wilder is intent on surviving his service and saving his family without any help from Dociline, and escaping the damage it did to his mother.
Here’s what editor Carl Engle-Laird has to say about the cover:
Docile is a book about sex and power, love and abuse, debt and luxury. It packs an incisive exploration of dark themes into a compulsively readable package that is tense, scary, classy, and most of all, sexy. We wanted the cover to communicate the terrible, destructive allure of wealth, the way money and power corrode and destroy. I couldn’t be happier with the result.
And here’s author K.M. Szpara’s reaction:
“Damn. Jamie Stafford-Hill’s cover design conveys exactly what I’m going for–that something sensual and sinister is happening between those pages. The temptation of class. Its threat to agency. I am seduced.”
Buy the Book
Docile
Docile will be released from Tor.com Publishing in March 2020.
File Under AO3 Tags:
- Dubcon/Noncon
- Dramatic Trillionaire Content
- BDSM and then some more BDSM and then a lot more BDSM
- Hurt/comfort and hurt/no comfort
- Cinnamon roll of steel
- The most scandalous kink: love
- Courtroom drama, bedroom drama, Preakness drama
- Debt and Decadence
