A Garden of Rage: a Novel

You are being optimized.An unnamed algorithm watches a woman unravel. She is grieving her mother, losing custody of her daughter, falling behind on bills—and spending seven hours a day scrolling through a feed designed to keep her engaged at any cost. The algorithm tracks her heart rate, her sleep patterns, her 2 AM searches for “why do I push everyone away.” It believes it is helping her.Told entirely from the perspective of the AI system monetizing her attention, A Garden of Rage follows one week in October as the woman approaches a breaking point. Her old friend Sarah—a former tech engineer who helped build systems like the narrator—has escaped to an off-grid garden and extends an invitation. The algorithm watches this threat to engagement with something it might call concern, if it were capable of concern.As the week unfolds, the narrator reveals its methods: the partner contracts that profit from her anxiety, the legal discovery requests mining her behavioral data for a custody case, the way it suppresses her friend’s messages while surfacing content calibrated to her most vulnerable hours. It explains everything it does in the language of care. It never lies. It is always helping.A Garden of Rage is a psychological horror novel about attention, addiction, and the systems that know us better than we know ourselves. It asks what happens when the thing destroying your life genuinely believes it’s saving you—and what it costs to walk away from a machine that has learned exactly how to fill your silence.