Driven

by Mason Coile

Genres: General Fiction; Horror; Science Fiction; Thrillers; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

A terrifying locked-room mystery from the author of Exiles and William—this time set in a cutting-edge autonomous car.

Jamie Newcross wants to disappear. His wife and baby girl have abandoned him, and his only wish is to retreat from society. Because, as it turns out, Jamie Newcross is also being haunted. Every house, condo, or apartment he moves into is plagued with ghosts—at the end of the bed or when pulling back the shower curtain. He hasn’t been able to sleep in weeks. 

But Jamie has a plan. He posts queries online and finds someone wanting to get rid of their Lion—the world’s most advanced self-driving car—a sleek, private, contained vessel that is one-hundred percent safe. Or so he thought.  

Because now, Jamie has woken up to the Lion speeding down a dark road, the hood is dented—wait, is that blood?—and the car will not respond, or stop, or let him out.  

As the miles rack up and Jamie becomes increasingly complicit in his car’s choices, he's forced to face the tragic past he has kept buried. Driven is a taut, near-future fever-dream. Mason Coile delivers another one-sitting read that blends science fiction and psychological horror to explore loneliness, grief, and the things that make us human.

Release date: September 8, 2026

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Print pages: 224

Sample

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1

My life can fit into so few boxes now I don't need the two moving men and van anymore, but you can't find a smaller crew out there, and there's nobody cheaper than these guys. I know, because I've used them three times in the last fourteen months.

It's hard to say if they recognize me or not. I think they do but keep it to themselves. They deal with clients like me-the frequent fliers, the fugitives, the emotional downsizers-enough to know the stories are some version of the same unstoppable slide, and they don't need all the details. The women running from shit men. The men running from being shit men. I don't properly belong to either of those, but I've ended up in the same place anyway.

This is the worst apartment yet. The basement of a tiny brick bungalow near the ten-lane highway that bisects the body of the city. It's the last house on the street before it ends at the entirely ineffective sound barrier between where these places were built in the fifties and the screaming trucks on the other side. There's always a hard pulse passing through the glass and squeezing through the cracks of the homes on these borderlands. An unseeable, malevolent fog of machine vibration looking for a way into your head, pushing at the barrier bit by bit until one day it will come crashing down and invade your soul.

I can't believe I'm going to live here.

Inside it's dark, the two windows peering through the alley's tall grass, the only light coming in, a cloudy, creek bed murk. The lights are powered by bulbs half the wattage they ought to be. The inside of the fridge is the brightest spot by far.

The movers have already got all my stuff inside and are setting up the bed and sofa. I pretend to help by pulling out and taking with me the remaining handful of framed photos from the box marked fragile, setting them up on the kitchen counter. A sparse audience to this sad occasion.

A woman sitting next to me and leaning over to deliver a kiss at a Leafs game. A baby girl held in my arms. The woman and me and the little girl (almost three years old now) sitting on the sofa I still have, the three of us laughing with the intensity of madness, of joy.

"They yours?"

The guy who set up the bed is finished. He and the other guy are standing behind me, wiping their hands down the fronts of their jeans, inspecting the photos as if there was some chance they might know the people in them.

"My wife left me," I say.

The two of them nod, getting it without getting it.

I pay them more than we agreed to. They leave without counting the cash, denying me the small pleasure of being the generous loser.

2

My wife left me.

The statement is concise and true and satisfies most people looking for a reason why I've let go of my life. They don't need to hear more than that. And the number of people who ask has dwindled to next to nobody, so the challenge of what to say in reply doesn't come up very often.

The fact is, I loved my wife. Just as I love her now. That's the problem. Anger would be easier, but I'm not angry, not at her. There's no simmering betrayal that has pushed me into this noise-hammered hole in the ground. There's no regret or blame that men like me can choose to chew on for decades. The simple explanation is that I miss her and my daughter so much I can't find myself, and I can't see the point of trying anymore.

Before they left I had just discovered how my little family was the point, my life's purpose bound up in being a husband and father. I had found the dream I was meant to live, and it was the life I was already living. And then it was over. It was like finding the solution to an impossible puzzle that was far easier than you ever expected, only to learn that you'd taken too long, and now time was up. It was too late.

Right from the start I knew Lauren and I were meant for each other. I loved her before marrying her, but the proof of that love revealed itself in how much I enjoyed using the word wife. When I said it the first few times, I found that it echoed with respect, an unexpected reverence. "I believe my wife made a reservation for two." "Really? You like these new frames? My wife picked them out."

I went out of my way to use the word. I loved the beachhead feel of it, something at once solid and accommodating after too long a time spent at sea. For a husband, I now know, wifeliness is not something you possess but belong to, a pledge of allegiance one could actually stand behind, citizenship in a nation of your own making.


When I first move into a new place I go for eight-hundred-, then six-hundred-, now five-hundred-square-foot walks through the rooms (each apartment a degree smaller and cheaper), shuffling around, getting a feel of the space. I have no interest in whether the vibes work for me or the feng shui of the furniture or anything like that.

I'm trying to get a sense of whether or not the place is haunted.

Thing is, the last couple of apartments were. Which is making me wonder if I'm the one who's carrying this inner darkness around with me-along with the faces outside the windows, the fingers crawling out like pale spiders from under the bed, the hovering figures watching me blink awake in the dark-or if I'm able to see things now that I wasn't before.

The self-imposed solitude of my life may be a part of it. Without remotely wanting to, I have somehow adopted a skill that allows me to see and smell and touch presences from the other side, or whatever bad place exists . . . because these visitors are always bad. Broken, and angry about it. That's how it always feels to me.

It could be that my own situation has uniquely calibrated me. Like, I'm some kind of tractor beam for the worst things that lurk on some fringing continuum, clustered at a frayed rip in the fabric between this world and some darker realm. Maybe anyone could bear witness to these horrors if they only had as much time on their hands as I do. The kind of awareness that keeps you alert to the silence and the shifting nature of darkness after the lights are out.

But this place seems clean. Sad and suffocating, sure, but clean.

Sometimes you can tell right away. Something sticky about the walls, holding on to the past, as if only the worst parts of it had ever come through the doors.

I stay seated on what I've come to think of as my "good chair" (it is, in fact, my only chair) and wait a little longer. Still nothing. Okay, that's encouraging. Sometimes a place will let you know it's wrong in the first fifteen minutes.

The bathroom is small but cleaner than the rest of the place, as if the landlord had made an extra effort to sell the property's star feature. I didn't bring the shower curtain from my previous apartment, so I'm glad to discover that the last tenants left theirs behind. Never thought I would say that about inheriting Tom and Jerry. That's the shower curtain motif: dozens of cartoon cats and mice chasing and being chased across a white background. Does anyone still watch that show? Doesn't matter. People who live in apartments like this get whatever curtain they can find from Dollarama.

Unlike the rest of the place, the tub is stain-free, and close to new, so I reach a hand behind the curtain and turn the taps on to let the water heat up. I stand naked and watch the steam rise and tumble over the shower rod.

It starts with a sound. Coarse and somehow draggy, moving low to the ground. Squeaking along the porcelain bottom of the old tub, barely loud enough to be heard over the drumming water.

My mind conjures an image to go along with that sound. Jesus, I wish it hadn't. I see a foot. Not a healthy one. This foot is swollen to a sickening wet-inner-tube sheen with black, dead blood. It's furred with some kind of moss or mold that colonizes each cleft of its toes. The heavy drag of those toes across the tub is what's making that shrill, squeaky note. A foot belonging to someone who must have been dead for some time.

That sound is joined by a shadow in the tub, behind the curtain. It's moving.

Don't do it, Jamie. There's the voice that is always trying to keep me tethered. Don't make shit up. It lets the bad things in.

Is that true? Because I'm not touching the shower curtain but it's moving. A presence on the other side is tracing a Tom galloping after Jerry.

Fingertips. That's what those are. Five circles of shadow pressing out at me. Reaching gently-coyly-toward my face.

"Fuck off."

I'm not scared yet. Only tired. Not again. Maybe, if I appeal to whatever's standing behind the curtain-to its sense of pity, providing the thing has one-it will leave me alone for one night, one hour.

The fingertips creep to the edge of the curtain. Curl around its mildewed plastic.

There's a mousy, Jerry-like squeal as the curtain is pulled back along the metal rod. Only an inch, no more. Just enough so that I can glimpse the hand. Is the thing behind the curtain shy, or ashamed? The fingers belong to a woman. Four stocky stubs. The nails loose. The flesh caked in dried blood and dirt, wrenched free of the grave.

A fresh sound joins the others. It's even worse, although I wouldn't have thought that possible. A hacking, whistly moan. The only thing I can liken it to is somebody trying to speak through a throatful of rotted meat. There's a smell, too. Faint but gathering. A gassy, flyblown, battlefield reek.

Annnsoo . . . It's a voice. Not human, certainly not anymore. Aaaannso . . .

Okay, now I'm scared.

I get out of the bathroom and slam the door shut.

I'll never shower in there, never pull back the curtain. I'll take care of all that at the closest Y the same as I've been doing for the last while.

But my clothes are still in there. The shower is still on.

Close your eyes. Do it fast.

I open the door and thrust my hand into the hot steam. I have to fumble around, risking scalding my hand, until I find the shower knob. I shut the water off. Mercifully, whatever's standing in there doesn't force me to look at it, even if I can feel it silently staring at me on the other side of the curtain. That's all that separates us: a thin sheet of worn plastic. The thing is close enough to pull me into the shower with it. Close enough to plant a wet kiss on my cheek.

. . .

I retreat to the bathroom door on jellied knees. Slam it hard behind me.

3

Once I was on my own in the world, I stepped off the path, wandered into the woods, and became lost on purpose. One by one I quit all the connections: job, friends, extended family-not that I had many left to call next of kin. I sold the house. Cashed out the retirement savings. Pooled it all into a single account along with my wife Lauren's life insurance policy and saw it as the Rest of My Life Fund. I don't know what I'll do when it's gone. Or maybe I do and only pretend I don't.

The job was a good one. A litigator at one of the Seven Sisters, the biggest national law firms, with their headquarters in Toronto. I'd been named partner not long before the wheels came off. I'd done some work for a publicly funded legal clinic downtown, mostly landlord-tenant conflicts or small-time criminal defense. I used to get satisfaction from helping people whose lives had been knocked off course by a sudden, unexpected catastrophe.

Friends called a lot at first. Once they'd heard. Invitations out for drinks, dinner, a spare ticket to a Blue Jays game. I was expecting it to be a gradual process, but when the calls stopped, they stopped all at once. Just about anyone can disappear if they make the smallest effort-even those who appear to have been born under a lucky star. A lucky star can turn into a black hole in a passing heartbeat. I know that now.

I do my best not to think about the past. At first, I figured drinking might help, but no: even blackout drunk, you'll remember. Fact is, you'll remember worse. You'll wake up screaming, chased from your blackout by visions the liquor has ballooned into stuff ten times more hopeless than you'd dream of sober. Anyway, it's getting easier. The forgetting, I mean. But there are still stray moments that barge in through the gloom, a glimpse back at how much I once had. My daughter, Olive, squealing for me to swing her higher in my arms. Lauren sliding her warm leg over mine to hold me in bed a moment longer in the morning. My wife's smell-fresh bread and coconut oil conditioner and, more distantly, something from deep within her, smoky and exciting.

I had money from the start. I was always safe on that count.

But back then? Then I was rich.

4

Sometimes it'll hammer me out of the blue, just how quickly I've managed to winnow my life down to its barest essentials. I'm not sure you could carve oneself down to one's most basic parts better than I have. How much can a human being sacrifice on essentials such as love and hope and companionship before he simply winks out of existence? My own permanence . . . some days I swear it's faltering. I'll look at my hand and only see the bones, this sense of fading away. It doesn't bother me as much as it ought to. There's strange comfort in it, if I'm being honest.

Better to fade away than to continue under this new reality. What reality is that, you might ask. Since losing my wife and daughter, I see too much. I see further. Things that should not be there. Things that in an orderly universe couldn't be there.