We Buy Trucks Taller Than Our Houses

In Bellwether, Michigan, the houses are getting smaller, the trucks are getting bigger, and the machines are learning how to do everything people once believed made them necessary.Seventeen-year-old Mara Mercer comes home one afternoon to find her father, Cal, proudly standing beside a massive new pickup truck-sixty-eight thousand dollars of diesel, chrome, debt, and possibility parked in front of a house that desperately needs a new roof. Mara takes a photograph and posts it with a simple caption:We buy trucks taller than our houses.The image goes viral.But behind the joke is a family-and a town-already beginning to fracture.Cal's factory is replacing workers with automation. A powerful logistics company called VANTA is transforming Bellwether with algorithms, autonomous vehicles, personalized pricing, and warehouses that need fewer human beings every year. Meanwhile, Silas Vale, a provocative technology thinker fascinated by Accelerationism, believes society may be asking the wrong question. Instead of trying to slow technological and economic disruption, what happens if we let it accelerate?What happens if we push the machine until its contradictions become impossible to ignore?For Mara, that question stops being philosophical when layoffs, debt, algorithms, political anger, a massive blackout, and an act of sabotage begin changing the people she loves. As Bellwether races toward an automated future, she must decide whether progress is something that happens to ordinary people-or something they can still shape.We Buy Trucks Taller Than Our Houses is a provocative, darkly funny novel about working-class America, consumerism, automation, artificial intelligence, debt, dignity, and the seductive promise of acceleration. At its heart is a family trying to remain human in a world becoming faster than anyone knows how to control.Because when everything is accelerating, the most important question isn't how fast we can go.It's who gets to decide where we're going.