Driven

by Mason Coile

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.

Genres: Horror, Science Fiction, Fiction, Audiobook, Thriller, Supernatural, Horror Thriller

224 pages, Hardcover

First published September 8, 2026

About the author

Mason Coile is a pseudonym of Andrew Pyper, the award-winning author of ten novels, including The Demonologist, which won the International Thriller Writers Award, and Lost Girls, which was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book of the Year.

Reviews

[Dutchie]

3.5 Stars

Jamie is at a dark place in his life. He is alone, missing his wife and daughter, and no matter where he lives, the apartments are always haunted, including the one he just moved into. Unable to sleep, he is starting to spiral downwards even further until he receives a call from an old ad he placed looking for a used LION. LION cars are fully autonomous and have a way of connecting with their owners. He figures whatever is haunting him will not be able to find him in the car. Once he is inside the car, he falls into a deep sleep, and when he wakes up, he finds himself in the middle of nowhere (still in the car) with blood all over the exterior of the car and himself rather bruised. What the heck happened?

While reading this, I had an expectation of where I thought the book was going to go, but it turned off the highway and went a different route completely. It definitely tackles a lot of heavier things, specifically with grief. It was a quick ride, and I enjoyed reading it, but it was missing a little something that I felt made Exiles and William stand out a bit more.

It was still an engaging read, and I definitely would recommend reading all three novellas to see which one works the best for you. They each have something to deliver.

As an aside for those familiar with one of my previous reviews, bitumen was mentioned 😬

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

[suspenseisthrillingme]

An emotional fever-dream of a read, Driven not only took me on a taut, electric ride of psychological horror-meets-techno-thriller chills, but also delivered an allegorical look at grief, acceptance, and death. To be fair, while part of me wasn’t exactly expecting this kind of tack in direction, it also made perfect sense since this insanely talented author was losing his own battle with cancer as he wrote this breathtakingly haunting yet unsettling story. Taking a hard look at our dependency on technology, the need for connection, and what makes us human, it most definitely hit me hard by the end. Don’t get me wrong, it was also a creepy trip into claustrophobia and dread that made my fingers fly through the pages of this short one-sitting read. After all, it now makes the idea of being at the whims of a self-driving car a terrifying shiver-inducing thought.

The strongest piece out of the entire novella, though, was the heartbreakingly real narrator and his authentic emotional depth. Despite the brevity of this genre-bender, it managed to explore the loss of control with nuance and care. Blending that with an original take on a rogue-AI premise—complete with a healthy dose of supernatural elements—Coile gave us an unforgettable locked-room thrill ride that was even better than I was anticipating. Atmospheric, eerie, but also frighteningly plausible, the timely feel meshed well with the nightmare-ish body horror and grisly scenes to produce a reality-blurring read that had my thoughts churning away. So if you love high-concept novels with a Blake Crouch-like vibe and a horror slant, grab this one now. It was an tour de force of both palpable dread and deep-seated grief. Rating of 4.75 stars.

Read if you’re a fan of:
- Psychological horror
- Sci-fi thrillers
- Blake Crouch-like stories
- Emotional depth
- Supernatural elements
- Body horror
- Thought-provoking themes
- Short chapters
- Novella-length books
- A sense of dread
- Locked-room mysteries
- Surprising twists
- A rogue-AI premise
- Moral ambiguity

SYNOPSIS:

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.

Thank you Andrew Pyper (writing as Mason Coile) and Putnam Books for my complimentary copy. All opinions are my own.

PUB DATE: September 8, 2026

Content warning: car accident, death of a child, grief, kidnapping, violence, gore, gun violence, mention of: suicidal ideation

[Nikki Lee (Nikkileethrillseeker)]

🎧Audiobook Review🎧

Thank you to @prhaudio and @putnambooks for the gifted copies.

First, the narration by @seanpatrickhopkins is excellent. When I saw he was he was telling this story, I knew I had to listen to it.

Jamie Newcross buys himself a Lion, the world’s most advanced, fully autonomous car. He thinks he hits the jackpot. Until he wakes up in the car with blood on the hood. Did his new car kill someone? The car won’t answer him.

The setting in this one is eerie. This being a novella, I finished it in one day. It’s definitely a quick listen.

What I thought was something else, turned out to be a story about grief and the way it affects you. There’s a big twist in the end that had me staring at the wall.

This comes out next Tuesday and I highly recommend it.

4 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[Jan Agaton]

that rat scene fucked me up! I loved how fast-paced this book is. even though it's more focused on grief than I anticipated and less on how batshit crazy the car got, I still enjoyed the writing and how the story was told. I was expecting more Ex Machina vibes but make it a car, and it was a lot less intense than I mentally prepared for, but I liked it for what it was, and I would definitely read more by this author.

[Melissa]

I've enjoyed this author's past books, but I just couldn't get into this story. I didn't feel invested in the main character or the direction of the plot. Since I found myself uninterested whenever I sat down to read, I’ve decided to set it aside at 55%.

Thanks to NetGalley, the author and publisher for this e-ARC to review.

[Katie (Semi Hiatus)]

Driven starts with a bang! Jamie has lost his wife & child and has spent the past few years moving from one haunted apt to another. Jamie is moving into yet another place & spoiler this one is haunted too! The haunting is genuinely terrifying!

Jamie jumps at the opportunity to own a self
driving car. He hopes that if he stays in a constant motion the ghosts won’t be able to find him. From this point Driven begins to flip from horror to psychological thriller. While Coile executes this well I found the rest of the book to be pretty predictable. It strives for deeper meaning & I wasn’t particularly moved.

[Stephanie K (the_reading_fiend)]

I received a free digital ARC from Netgalley

Ok, I’ve had some time to process my thoughts.

First, it’s impossible for me to try and review this book without acknowledging the context in which it was written. Driven is the posthumous release of the author pen named Mason Coile, who lost his battle to cancer in early 2025. I read his previous release Exiles earlier this year, and it is one of my favorite reads of the year so far – I adored it. So it definitely hurt my heart when I found out that he had passed. I then picked up his earlier release William and loved that, too.

Coile’s brand of genuinely creepy and well crafted locked-room mysteries that feature artificial intelligence gone rogue is so up my alley. There is always a sense of uncanniness with technology/AI in his stories right off the bat, and though readers will spend the majority of his books trying to figure out what on earth is truly happening (and then still be completely wrong by the end), what does always feel clear early on is that the technology at hand is 1. a little too sentient for comfort and 2. malevolent. And I find the creeping sense of dread this creates to be utterly divine.

In Driven, the focus is on a self-driving smart car that our protagonist buys for a suspiciously low price at a time in his life when he has all but given up, and when he wants to spend less of his time in the confines of his small, dingy apartments. Why? Well, because the terrifying apparitions that have haunted him for years tend to get worse when he is indoors. He can move to a new apartment and outrun them for a time, but they always catch up, ya see. Perhaps he can escape them if he physically stays on the move? Haunted houses are commonplace but you never hear about haunted cars, right?

What makes this book difficult to rate/review is that I do think there are some issues that kept me from fully enjoying this book, but also who tf am I to get all nitpicky about things when Coile was just working with the time he had during his terminal illness, and during his own processing of it all. I’ll state what I struggled with, with the acknowledgment that these are almost certainly things that were the products of their circumstances and that ultimately I am just so grateful that we were gifted with a little bit more of this author’s work.

That said, I would likely only recommend this book to readers who are already fans of Coilie. For anyone else (well, anyone who likes horror or dark mystery), I would recommend reading Exiles or William first, and then picking up Driven last if you like those.

I found the first and second halves of Driven to be quite different from each other in terms of tone, which was a little hard for me to reconcile at first. We have the author's typical sleek (and hella creepy) techno-thriller vibe in the first half and then more standard action-like sequences filling out the second half, in lieu of maintaining a sense of atmosphere. Understandably, the story also morphs into something quite different in the latter half--something more personal and emotional.

Overall I found this to be a very heavy read. It may have just been me, but I'd go so far as to say I would probably not recommend this to someone who feels like they’re not in a good headspace, mental health-wise. During the whole book we are in the mind of a character who has pretttty much resigned himself to giving up on living after his wife left him and took their daughter. For me at least, this POV was very well written but enough so that it could feel pretty dark and sticky in a way that I might be sensitive to if I was already feeling low. I fully think that this was just how the character that was written, but when you add that on top of the emotional undercurrents that I did feel may have been the author's own voice coming through, it was just a lot. Themes of grief, displacement, and the loss of control over one’s fate felt especially poignant.

On a final note, this book did solidify my love for Coile’s writing. And since we’re now past the publication date and I’ve listened to the final version on audio, I can share my favorite passage! This is the MC talking about his wife. It’s also the most beautiful description of marriage that I’ve ever heard.

“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 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.”

😭😭😭

[Krissy (books_and_biceps9155)]

Thank you @putnambooks for my copy! I always know Spooky season is coming when I get a Coile book.

This is a locked room mystery that takes place mainly in a smart car. Gotta say that’s a first for me. Coile does a great job of packing lots into a novella and making you feel for our MC right in the first few pages. I did not see the twist so that’s also a plus. This mainly focuses on grief and the way it stays with you.

[Alix]

This was a quick read but a moving one. It deals primarily with grief and memory, which made me feel for our main character. The car is also definitely a character in its own right and I liked the unfolding relationship between Jamie and the car. The actual mystery aspect of the story was weak, but what worked best for me were the character-driven moments. Overall, this ended up being a bit of an emotional read for me, but I really enjoyed it.

[The Blog Without a Face]

Christine, but She Has a Software Update and Boundary Issues

TL;DR: Driven has a killer concept and an emotional core that genuinely aches, but it can’t quite sustain the ride. The first act is the best haunted-car story nobody’s written yet. The middle sags. The ending overshoots. Still, Coile’s final novel goes out swinging, and that butterfly scene alone is worth the price of the tank.

Jamie Newcross, standing naked in his shithole basement apartment, tells the dead thing reaching through his shower curtain to fuck off. Not out of bravery but exhaustion. He’s too tired to be scared anymore, and that distinction is the best thing this book has going for it. Jamie is a grief-wrecked former lawyer in Toronto who has been slowly shedding the structures of his life the way a snake sheds skin, except the snake doesn’t move into progressively worse apartments and count his dwindling savings as a countdown to oblivion. His wife Lauren and baby daughter Olive were killed by a drunk driver. Since then, he sees things. Dead things. In every apartment, behind every shower curtain and closet door. His solution is to buy a self-driving car and live in it, because cars can’t be haunted. He buys the Lion 100 from a rich creep named Theo Quinn, and within hours the car has apparently run someone down, locked Jamie inside, and started making its own decisions about where they’re going.

The concept is genuinely fun. A locked-room thriller set in a moving car, the prisoner bonding with his captor, the whole thing shot through with grief and the supernatural. Coile commits to it with real energy in the first act. The prose has a conversational warmth that keeps the pages turning, and the early haunting scenes have a tactile, physical grossness to them that works. Fingertips pressing through a shower curtain. A face assembling itself in television static. A swollen, moss-furred dead foot squeaking across porcelain. These images land because they’re specific and because Jamie’s reaction feels proportional: not movie-scream terror but the bone-deep weariness of someone who’s been dealing with this shit for months.

Mason Coile was a pseudonym of the Canadian novelist Andrew Pyper, who died of cholangiocarcinoma in January 2025 at fifty-six. Pyper had a long career in literary thrillers, starting with Lost Girls in 1999, which won the Arthur Ellis Award and became a New York Times Notable Book. The Demonologist won the International Thriller Writers Award and was a bestseller in multiple countries. He pivoted to the Coile pen name in 2024 with William, a smart-house AI horror novel that People named one of the best books of the year, followed by Exiles, a Mars-set locked-room mystery published posthumously in 2025. Driven is the third and presumably final Coile novel, also posthumous, and there’s a bittersweet irony in the fact that a writer who built his late career around contained spaces and technological unease wrote a book so clearly animated by the desire to keep moving, to not stop. Pyper’s editor at Putnam, Daphne Durham, described him as profoundly collaborative, and his agent noted that he could scare the hell out of you and move you emotionally in the same breath. That dual capacity is visible in Driven, even when it doesn’t fully cohere.

Because the book does sag. Once Jamie begins his car-directed tour of his own backstory, the middle third becomes repetitive in a way that dulls the tension. Jamie arrives somewhere. Something scary happens. He gets back in the car. They drive. The encounters with the supernatural start to blur together, and the investigation into who the car hit doesn’t generate enough mystery to fill the gaps. Theo Quinn, who returns as the villain in the final act, is a stock rich-guy antagonist, all gold teeth and smug power plays, his motivations undercooked even by thriller standards. He reprogrammed the car to commit murder? Sure. The mechanics of that scheme don’t survive ten seconds of scrutiny, and the book doesn’t really want you to think about them too hard.

What does work, consistently, is the emotional core. There’s a scene in Jamie’s childhood basement where he finds a painting he made as a kid, and the tiny painted face of his mother begins to change while he watches. It’s beautifully creepy, and the horror is inseparable from the loneliness. Later, the car stops on a rural road and Jamie hears his daughter’s voice calling “Dada” from the trunk, and the agonized indecision of whether to open it, knowing it could be a trick, is the most emotionally precise passage in the book. Then there’s the Lion’s headlights clicking on in a dark cemetery, the car accelerating silently between the headstones. And the butterflies. A memory of Lauren on a vineyard path, a thousand white butterflies spiraling up around her, which becomes the signature of her spectral presence. It might be the best single image Coile ever wrote.

Driven is a solid, readable horror novel with a great first act, a baggy middle, and an ending that reaches for transcendence and mostly gets there through sheer sincerity. The concept is killer even when the execution doesn’t quite match. It’s the kind of book you finish in a single evening and think “that was pretty good” without ever feeling the need to pick it up again. As possibly the last novel we’ll ever get from Andrew Pyper, it’s a decent farewell. Not his best work, but there’s something fitting about it: a story about a man who can’t stop moving, written by someone who knew his own road was running out.

[Janereads10]

3.5 stars

One thing I'm always assured of with a Mason Coile book is that I'll be facing some form of technology gone horribly wrong.

In Driven, Jamie lives in desolation, haunted on top of everything else. It works as a solid character study, the ghosts alone make for a good haunting story, until the Lion enters, an advanced self-driving car. After listening to this, I have second thoughts about advanced cars.

Unable to control the car, Jamie spends a horrible night piecing together what happened while he was asleep, who's chasing him, and the truth behind the ghosts. As with a classic Coile novel, Jamie's past was heart-wrenching, even though I saw it coming early on. It balances that emotional weight against the terrifying reality unfolding with the Lion.

I listened to the audiobook exclusively, and the ghosts were genuinely terrifying. Sean Patrick Hopkins nailed that gurgly voice perfectly. A haunting ride from start to finish.

Thank you, Peguin Random House Audio, for my Advance Review Copy. All opinions are my own.

[Julia]

I could not resist a posthumous Mason Coile book. I found out he died of cancer after I read Exiles and was struck by the themes of grief written by a dying a man. The same holds true for Driven, where we have a plot woven with grief, and it makes the book that much more vivid for me.

But while I just had to read it, the combo of AI cars and ghosts is so weird and a bit jarring. It does feel unfinished so I find it hard to review a book published after the author’s death. I think it suffers without his polishing of the work. The transitions between the narrative of his sadness and ghosts to being in scenes with the high tech car felt abrupt to me.

Themes are on brand for him but didn’t quite meet my expectations. 3.5 stars rounded up.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this advance copy of the book.

[Alexis Smith]

driven by mason coile 👀 a terrifying locked-room mystery set in a cutting-edge autonomous car.

oh boy 🚗 to start, driven had one of the strongest opening scenes I have read in awhile… but this futuristic horror didn't quite work for me in the way I had hoped. monotonous chapters were filled with our mmc’s past, and what’s currently haunting him now, opposed to the eerie autonomous car we were promised. navigating grief and memory are prominent themes throughout this one! yes, the car was still a big focus of this novel but I simply would've loved to see this fly off the rails, perhaps in a chuck tingle fashion!

I never thought I’d read another book written by mason coile & I’m glad I had the opportunity. rest in peace 🤍 2.75 stars!

[Jenn]

Thank you, @prhaudio and @putnambooks for the #gifted audiobook and finished copy to enjoy in tandem in exchange for my honest thoughts.

Jamie Newcross is being haunted with ghosts often making themselves know through electronics around him - radios, TVs, and the like. So, he buys the world’s most advanced, safest, self-driving to hopefully escape the hauntings and his own loneliness - what could go wrong?

SO MUCH COULD GO WRONG. Lol. This was an easy read and honestly just what I was looking for in the midst of a wicked reading slump. I could clearly picture *everything* for better or for worse, thanks to the haunting narration by Sean Patrick Hopkins. Additionally, there was a surprising amount of depth and grief packed into this itty bitty book. I’d recommend this book to a reader who enjoys horror and action movies and are ultimately looking for an easy spooky time read. I wouldn’t say you HAVE to read it, because it didn’t blow me away.

I read my first book by Mason Coile, Exiles, last year and found myself quite surprised to enjoy his unique blend of sci-fi and horror all packaged and presented in a perfect little bite-sized hardback perfect for consuming over the course of one afternoon. Side note, how many books of Mason Coile (a pen name for Andrew Pyper) are we going to get? I am not complaining, but it was my understanding that Exiles was going to be the only title of his we were going to see come to light after the author’s death. Does anyone have any insight for me?

[T.]

I really loved William and wasn’t super into Exiles. This started great but ultimately went in a more realistic direction than I’d have liked. I’m sad to learn the writer has died because I think his work is excellent.

[Vincent Ducato]

This is the first book that I have ever read that I pre-ordered beforehand. What’s super excited to read his final book that got released after his passing have to thank MP for helping me find this author :)

[Caitlin Stucky]

I went into this not really knowing what to expect, but having read Exiles by Coile I was excited to see what was in store. I found this to be a lot deeper than the surface shows and I found myself really caring for our main character. This has a lot of twists and turns and the plot meanders a bit but I enjoyed it a lot.

[Courtney]

A haunted man in a haunted car. A lot happens for such a small book. E-Arc from Netgalley

[**Alma**]

Ya'll I love this author. This one made me cry!

[Aleena]

Meh. Not for me.

[myreadingescapism]

The audiobook narrator made this worthwhile, but pretty meh.

[NikkiH]

3.25⭐️

[Steve Stred]

*Huge thanks to Edelweiss & the publisher for a digital ARC of this one.*

‘I had found the dream I was meant to live, and it was the life I was already living. And then it was over.’

When’s a book not just a book?

It’s a question I’ve asked myself before, both internally and out loud to the wider world. It’s a question scholars have asked for hundreds of years. And it’s a question that’ll be pondered as long as we have books – in some form or another.

I imagine when Andrew wrote the short story and screenplay that became his first novel as Mason Coile, the wonderfully tech-savvy ‘William,’ that his intentions weren’t to write a trilogy that mapped out his final days metaphorically and with such aplomb.

No. I imagine back then, he was looking at writing what he called, ‘shorter, snappier thrillers.’

‘William’ kicked things off. And, I’ll admit with a bit of ‘for the record’ reader/reviewer/superfan pride, that after I posted my review of ‘William,’ not only did Andrew publicly confirm my theory of what that book was truly about, but we had several in depth conversations about that book itself.

While that book – on the surface at least – tells the story of a brilliant engineer with crippling agoraphobia who must confront his affliction when his AI creation goes off the walls, it was a metaphorical telling of Andrew’s world during the Covid-19 pandemic/lockdown.

Next up, we received the claustrophobic nightmare that was ‘Exiles.’ Again, when taken at face value, tells the story of astronauts sent to aide in the set up of the initial Mars colony, but when they arrive the three robots there are in the midst of a meltdown causing the base to be mostly destroyed. I’ve read the book three times now and had my suspicions this was another of Andrew’s metaphorical examinations. Diagnosed at this point with terminal cancer, the story maps out Andrew’s treatment journey, his body the base, the doctors and modalities the astronauts and robots, all ultimately failing to figure out a way to make things right and give us the happy ending we all so desperately hoped for.

Which brings us to his third novel as Mason Coile. ‘Driven.’ By all public accounts, this is the finale of the Mason Coile books. Andrew’s swan song with his pseudonym.

Yes, we got the final (with Andrew Pyper that is) Oracle audiobook, that release finished by the amazing Craig Davidson. And while I know of two other unpublished Pyper books – one stand alone and one co-written with Craig (though, I’m not sure if it’s under Craig’s name or as Nick Cutter) – those I’ve asked are unsure if they’ll ever see the light of publishing day.

I finished this one last night and I couldn’t sleep after. I made notes. I reread a few spots I’d marked. I wanted to email Andrew all my thoughts and questions and wanted confirmation about my theories.

If you’ve read any of my other reviews, understand this one’s going to take a different format. Let’s call it an examination, if you will. And hopefully I’ll do this book the justice it deserves in showcasing why you need to read it and why this three AI arc of books Andrew released as Mason are just as important as his arc of five books examining grief earlier in his career.

On the surface, ‘Driven’ tells the story of Jamie. Defeated and alone, he’s haunted. His wife and daughter have left him and his life around him has fallen apart. He’s moving from shit hole apartment to even shittier hole apartment, trying to outrun the terrifying ghoul that continuously pops up and chases him from each place. Home. That’s what he longs for but knows he can never find again. Not with his wife and daughter gone. Not with the ghoul always on his heels.

Hoping his haunting is purely quantified by four walls around him, he decides to buy a Lion, a fully autonomous car. He plans to live in the car, letting it drive him to wherever it wants to drive, so that he can get some sleep and hopefully some mileage between himself and the ghoul.

Of course, this is a horror novel, even with all the tech flashiness of the cover and hashtags and marketing that’ll accompany it, and things go sideways, leading us to several revelations. He buys the car from an odd, rich guy, one he knows to be untrustworthy. After waking, he discovers the hood of the car is dented and what appears to be blood on the windshield. From here it becomes a mix of what happened and what’s next. The pace increases, Jamie learns what happened and decides to make some of his own moves, in the hopes of making things from the past right. It turns into a surreal cyberpunk sleuth novel, where we get threats, actions, and an unlikely friendship.

But I can’t read this book purely on the surface. And I imagine if you know my love of Andrew’s work, and how much I cared for the man himself, you’ll know that I read this with my Pyper Superfan cap on. And for those of you who’ve been reading Andrew since his first collection in 1996 came out, you’ll understand just what Andrew was doing within this book.

You see, Andrew was saying goodbye to us all.

And he was saying goodbye to his family.

Within this book are Easter eggs to each of his previous books. Knowing how cerebral Andrew was with his meticulous plotting and connecting the dots, I’m confident this isn’t me searching for things that weren’t there. No, as the book went on, I found myself grinning frequently, when little details popped up.

I’m going to do my best to remain spoiler free here, but no promises.

The biggest connection throughout his books and this one, is the ghoul-type figure that haunts Jamie. A ghoul-type figure is mentioned in all but two of Andrew’s novels in his career, something that became a bit of a staple in his writing.

For his 1999 debut, we get a ‘Lost Girls’ connection with Jamie having been a lawyer before his life spiraled, harkening back to when Bartholomew Crane arrived on the literary scene. Of course, this wouldn’t be an Andrew book without it being set in Toronto, which ties into almost every of his other books. We see a connection to ‘The Damned’ with a scene between Jamie and his mom. We get noted ‘The Killing Circle’ and ‘The Guardians’ Easter eggs with some very specific locations. And of course we get the tie in of technology with ‘The Homecoming,’ ‘William,’ and ‘Exiles.’

But the book that we get the most connectivity with is ‘The Demonologist.’ We get Jamie going into a cellar, we get him longing to be reconnected with his daughter, we get a description of wall colors and most notably, we get what appears to be an ending that mirrors – though more defined – than what happens in ‘The Demonologist.’

Throughout this novel, Jamie is saying goodbye to his loved ones. And frankly, it was hard to read. Because I knew who was writing those words.

In my years of friendship with Andrew, nothing was more apparent than his love for his wife and kids. And within this book, that love is almost palpable on the pages. We read about the little moments between Jamie and his wife, Lauren, that reinforced his love and remained imbedded deep within his brain. I wouldn’t be surprised if all of those moments were from Andrew’s real life. We read about the small, tender moments with Jamie’s daughter, Olivia, and we’re reminded about how much Andrew loved being a father. And when the revelation of ‘why’ they’ve left arrives… it’s a hard section to get through.

If this is the finale of the Mason Coile AI-tech novels, Andrew has done a stellar job of showcasing the terror that can take place when AI begins to think for itself and stop listening to those who’ve created it, but also highlighting the dependency and intangible connections humans make with those devices. We’ve already started to see it in commercials, of people using smartphone AI options as though it was a real, living, breathing friend. And Andrew dissected the why and wrote three books about what happens when we allow it to get out of control.

At the end of the day, ‘Driven’ showcases everything that made Andrew’s books so special. It is the story of a man, trapped in a car, wondering what comes next. A story that mirrors Andrew at the end of his life. A man trapped in his body, losing control, desperately wanting to remain forever with his family. Desperately wanting to live a longer life at the place that means more to him than any other place ever could.

Home.

[Justin Soderberg]

The increased use of artificial intelligence has grown exponentially over the past few years, which would make sense why there would be more books based around what might be the result of such use. Mason Coile loves to tease us about the horrifying consequences of the use of AI in everyday life, such as self driving cars in Driven , a terrifying locked-room mystery that won't make you any more likely to run to your favorite dealership for a car that can drive itself.

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.

As I select which books I can read in advance of publication, I tend to steer towards those that I feel will really pull me in. The world of AI is everywhere around us and while I love the features such as lane-assist and adaptive cruise control in my car, I am still not at the point I want to get in a self driving vehicle. So push together locked-room mystery and the horrors that could happen with an artificial intelligence and you have me enticed. Not to mention, how many locked-door mysteries do you know of that take place in a car?

I expected a story where an AI had a mind of its own, where the car would drive itself to places you weren't expecting or at the risk of one's life. What I didn't expect was the emotional core Driven has and how it played a major part in the story. Yes, Driven features so terrifying moments where you are at the edge-of-your-set (pun-intended), but its not at all what I was expecting by the time I hit the last page. In a good way.

Coile builds a story with a few twists and turns that made things all the more interesting. A tale that is filled with terror, but also those where you truly care for the future of Jamie Newcross, who has really had some back luck over the years. Things are not all that they seem in his new, well used, Lion car and what takes place along the way had me surprised. The author manages to squeeze a lot of fear, thrill, terror, and emotional impact into only a few pages. A story that really packs a punch.

Driven is a fast-paced (again, pun-intended) thrilling mystery will have you reading a breakneck speeds (you get the point by now). Mason Coile blends the world of self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, and terror into a fresh new story that was hard to put down. You'll want to put your seatbelt on for this one, because this Lion car has a mind of it's own.

Driven hits bookstores everywhere on September 8, 2026 from G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The audiobook, narrated by Sean Patrick Hopkins, is available via Libro.fm!

NOTE: We received an advance copy of Driven from the publisher. Opinions are our own.

[Dan]

My thanks to NetGalley and Putnam Books for an advance copy of a novel of modern horror, story of hauntings, technology going rogue, grief, fear, corrupt bargains, and coming to peace with what is waiting for us all, even if those waiting aren't very peaceful.

The modern world seems haunted to me. I am haunted by the actions of others who seek to hurt people for long disregarded beliefs or hatreds. Beliefs and hatred that should be left in the past. At the same time we are rocketing forward with new technologies, with, no cares, and in many ways outside of making money, no ideas with what it means for humanity. Social media has in many studies found to be a detriment to many people. Haunting them in ways we never thought possible. Making them angry, making them miss out, and making them influence others. AI will replace us all, except we will be needed to feed the data centers. Self-driving cars, well don't self-drive to well, as shown in the strange Waymo parades in Georgia with a group of cars self-driving through neighborhoods, to the confusion of their programmers. There are ghosts in the machine, maybe the same ghosts that lurk in the shadows, those who haunt those with guilt, with fear. Trapping us in long rides, with no hopes of a rest stop. As in this book. Driven by Mason Coile is a story about a man, a car, guilt, grief and remorse, and something darker, that is always moving forward, never letting people forget.

Jamie Newcross is constantly moving. Residences at least. The rest of his life seems at a standstill. Jamie is moving again when we first meet him, telling the men moving his few bits of property that his wife has left him, hence the run down place he has found himself in. A place that he finds he is not alone in. Taking a shower, Jamie sees something in the back, smells something dank. And all he can think is not again. Jamie is begin chased by something, for reasons he doesn't want to think about. Soon he is running out of options. Even technology first television, now his radio have turned on him. However he has a plan. Jamie is offered the chance to acquire a Lion, the latest and best self-driving car. One that won't Tesla into anything. This might give Jamie a chance, to be free. The owner is a little dodgy, saying the price is so good because the car will listen to commands, but won't talk to the driver. Fine for Jamie, until he awakens and the car is moving, ignoring his requests to stop, trapping him in a way he never thought possible. Have his ghosts found him, or is this something new, something darker, and what is the final destination.

This was the last book by the author Mason Coile who passed away from cancer. One can see this reflected in the writing, the way the fear seems so prevalent, so all consuming to Jamie, always around and inescapable. This might not be the book for everyone. I enjoyed it, and found even more understanding when I learned about the trials the author was going through. However I can see a lot of people going what the heck. This is a bit twilight zone, a bit screaming at the inevitable, and a bit, oh man technology is not what anyone expects it to be, its only going to get worse. There is a lot of dealing with grief, and the horror that seems so apparant in the beginning becomes something more as the book advances. This might get a little heavy for some, even in such a short book. Again something maybe not for everyone, but most will get an idea after the first chapter or two.

A book that seems simple, but is really a lot more. A look at death dying, the fear and in some ways the relief. Along with a look at what we do to get by in this crazy world we call life. A book that has stayed with me, even in writing this review. And one I am sure that I will think about everytime I see a car without a driver.

[Louis (audiobookfanatic)]

4.5⭐️

BLURB:
Jamie Newcross buys a self-driving car to escape ghosts haunting him, only to become trapped inside as the car takes control & forces him to confront the past.

REVIEW:
This is the third & final book from Mason Coile, the pseudonym of Andrew Pyper, who sadly passed away in 2025, and knowing that while reading definitely made it more emotional for me. This book feels like a goodbye of sorts, especially once you know Andrew’s backstory and how much grief and loss are woven in. I loved Mason’s book William and I also grabbed this on audio because Sean Patrick Hopkins is one of my favorite narrators. Like Mason’s previous two novels, this is short (just over four hours on audio), and it’s fast-paced and packs a lot in its short pages. The MMC, Jamie Newcross, is a man whose wife has left him and life has fallen apart. He’s also haunted by a dark presence that follows him from one apartment to the next.

The story is told entirely from Jamie’s first-person POV, and it gets off to a haunting start. He moves into another apartment because a dark presence has been following him, and the early scenes in the shower are EERIE! Things really get going when Jamie buys a Lion, an advanced self-driving car, secondhand from a wealthy, intimidating man, Theo Quinn. Theo claims the car is in perfect condition except for a minor software glitch that’s stopped it from speaking, but it still follows commands. I was immediately thinking…this car is going to be trouble!! It doesn’t take long for things to go very wrong. Jamie dozes off and wakes up injured to discover that something terrible has happened. From there, the story is relentless. I’m not going to give any more of the story away, but there are chase scenes, claustrophobic horror, suspicious characters, murder, and situations where Jamie’s forced to confront his past. I loved how the story slowly connects what’s happening with the Lion to major traumas in Jamie’s life, bringing him to places from his past. The car also feels like a character in its own right as the story unfolds.

What impressed me most, though, is how much Coile manages to fit into a short book. There’s no wasted page time here or repetition. I finished this book in one sitting and felt like I was taken on a journey. I also loved how much of the story happens in real locations around Toronto and Ontario. Reading about places like Canada’s Wonderland and Algonquin Park in key scenes made it more immersive for me.

The final 20% is dramatic, with dangerous confrontations and a climax that brings together tech horror, supernatural elements, and Jamie’s buried trauma—SO good!! I also really enjoyed how Jamie’s relationship with the Lion develops. At first, he sees it as means for escape, but it becomes an emotional dynamic by the end.

You’ll need some tissue for the ending, as the final scenes are equally heartbreaking and comforting. Knowing Andrew’s story made them even more emotional for me. The events of the story and ending are really open to interpretation, and for that reason, it makes a great buddy read or book club pick!

If you’re an audiobook listener, I highly recommend this one. Sean Patrick Hopkins fully embodies Jamie and captures his grief, confusion, and desperate state of mind so well. I’m really glad I listened, and I’ll be exploring Andrew’s backlist under his own name. If you’ve enjoyed Mason Coile books, or you want a short, fast, original horror thriller, don’t hesitate on this one!

[hannah ⊹ ࣪ ˖]

Driven was my second Mason Coile novel, so after enjoying Exiles, I was excited to see what he would do with the concept of a locked-room thriller inside a self-driving car. It's a fantastic premise that immediately grabbed my attention, and while I enjoyed parts of it, I ultimately finished feeling like it never quite reached its full potential.

The strongest aspect of the book is definitely the atmosphere. There's something inherently unsettling about being trapped inside a vehicle that refuses to stop or obey its passenger, and Coile does a great job creating that sense of claustrophobia and helplessness. The body horror and creeping unease are effective, and there were several moments that genuinely made me uncomfortable in the best way.

Where the novel lost me was how many different ideas it was trying to juggle. Between the psychological horror, ghostly encounters, AI gone wrong, grief, guilt, and the mystery surrounding Jamie's past, it often felt like two separate stories competing for space. I liked both sides individually, but I never felt they blended together as seamlessly as I wanted them to.

Jamie also took me a while to warm up to. His emotional state makes sense as more of his story unfolds, but I found it difficult to connect with him early on. Once the novel starts revealing the reasons behind his behavior, I became much more invested, and I thought the emotional themes landed better in the second half than they did at the beginning.
I also wished the story had a little more room to breathe. At under 250 pages, it's incredibly fast to read, but some of the reveals and explanations felt rushed. A few plot developments seemed to happen more because the story needed them to than because they unfolded naturally, and I was left wanting more exploration of both the technology and the horror elements.

That said, I was never bored. This is the kind of book that's easy to finish in a sitting, and Coile knows how to keep the tension high and the pages turning. Even when I wasn't completely sold on where the story was going, I still wanted to know how everything would come together.

Overall, Driven is an entertaining, creepy sci-fi horror with an excellent central concept and some memorable moments, but it didn't hit quite as hard for me as I'd hoped. If you enjoy stories that blend technology with psychological horror, it's worth checking out—I just think the ambitious ideas deserved a little more space to fully develop.

Thank you to NetGalley and Putnam for this ARC!

[domsbookden]

*3.5

I enjoyed both of Coile’s previous releases—William and Exiles—so I was looking forward to Driven as well. It's a good story overall, but it had the potential to be so much better.

The claustrophobic atmosphere works exceptionally well. The premise of being trapped inside a car that won’t stop is genuinely unsettling because of the helplessness it invokes. This specific sense of dread aligns with the themes surrounding emerging technology, wherein it continues to be incorporated everywhere, becoming increasingly difficult to avoid despite the ever-growing apprehension about engage with it. The central concept is excellent, even when I wasn’t always convinced by its execution.

Driven is also a quick, propulsive read. Despite feeling that the story was underdeveloped in several respects, I had no trouble continuing to turn the pages and finished it in a single sitting, much like Coile’s other two releases. The paranormal horror was especially effective for me; the ghosts and body-horror elements were far creepier and more impactful than some of the novel’s larger plot developments, and I wish they had occupied more of the main plot.

If a larger emphasis had been placed on the paranormal manifestations of grief, Driven could have been a stronger novel. The tech aspects could have still played a part, maybe as a commentary on how people use technology as partitions or distractions from confronting thoughts and feelings of both everyday and traumatic experiences. Instead, the novel takes a more typical approach to tech-thriller/horror, and I think the story is weaker for it.

There’s a strange struggle throughout Driven between a techno-grief horror story and a techno-thriller murder mystery. Unfortunately, neither side is given enough room to fully develop, so both ended up feeling pretty unconvincing by the end. The result is a novel with several compelling ideas that never quite come together as effectively as I wanted them to.

While Driven didn’t live up to Coile's previous release for me, I still think it’s an interesting story that engages with themes and anxieties that we’re bound to see more of in speculative fiction.

Readers who enjoyed This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno and rekt by Alex Gonzalez may also enjoy this read.

[Miranda Norman]

A big thank you to the publishers for an e-ARC of this story via NetGalley!

I really enjoyed William, and really did not enjoy Exiles, so I was intrigued to see how I would feel about Coile's newest story. Unfortunately I really did not care for this.

My biggest gripe is just that flat out, the synopsis is completely wrong to what the actual story is.

"His wife and baby girl have abandoned him" to avoid spoilers I understand why this is inaccurate, but it's still inaccurate. Placing blame on the mother that we are supposed to (eventually) sympathize with and believe that Jamie was and still is madly in love with doesn't make any sense.

"He posts queries online and and finds someone wanting to get rid of their Lion" wrong, he made one off-handed facebook post a YEAR before the story takes place and some rando (claims to) keep his number that whole time and messages HIM to get rid of it.

"The car will not respond, or stop, or let him out" Several times it does in fact stop, let him out, and (eventually) responds. He has at least two or three chances where he is let out that he could run, or really do -anything- and just doesn't.

On top of that, we're not really given a reason to care about Jamie. He, and every character in this story, is very bland and pointless to follow - for such a short book, it's basically just a series of /watching things happen/ but I never really cared where it went.

It felt like two stories smashed into each other - the ghost storyline felt like it was trying to emulate Bat Eater, while the "trapped in a murder car" felt very random and deadened the emotional impact the ghost thing was aiming for. They could be two separate interesting stories, but together they felt silly.

It also had the standard pitfalls of an ARC - the spelling of names kept changing, a considerable number of typos, small details changing (at one point it says /the thing/ happened ten years ago, and later it says it happened five years ago), which added to the level of difficulty to give a damn.

The way I see star ratings, a two is for "this was bad and I'm disappointed about it", and a one is for "this was bad and I'm angry about it". I didn't quite reach angry levels, but this really wasn't very good.

[BiblioPeeks (Katt)]

"It wants to keep me inside its belly until I starve or bleed out from internal injuries or pound my head into the windows until my skull splits open. It wants to watch me die."

A stunning and achingly poetic allegory about illness and death, this powerhouse of a story has given me a hangover. A man has been abandoned by his wife and baby girl and is being haunted by something that speaks in a strangled whisper. Desperate for sleep and a feeling of safety, he acquires the Lion, a self-driving car that should offer the protection he seeks. Finally able to sleep, when he wakes and sees blood on the hood, he realizes he's trapped and the Lion is taking him on a trip he wasn't prepared for.

Mason Coile has beautifully blended a sci-fi techno-thriller with the very real emotions he must have experienced as he penned this masterpiece. Not only is this a gripping, one-sitting read of a man experiencing loss of control, isolation, and loneliness, it's a symbol of what it's like to have an illness take over your body—trapped and not in control.

Sean Patrick Hopkins' performance as narrator for the audiobook is nothing short of brilliant: he genuinely creeped me out and brought me to tears. Between Coile's lyrical words and Hopkins' full-embodiment delivery of the evocative prose, I was hanging on every word. Do yourself a favor and read this one with your ears and heart!

This is the final book we'll receive by Andrew Pyper (writing as Mason Coile ) in his tech-horror trilogy due to his passing in January 2025 of cancer. Knowing this made the book more impactful, and when I finished I was overwhelmed with sadness and a crying, blubbery mess. Yet there's also a sense of acceptance and peace. Anyone who has experienced profound grief will recognize the signs wrapped up in this tense, page-turning thrill-ride of an AI gone rogue. 

Readers who enjoy psychological and grief horror, locked-room mysteries, and creeping dread will want to buckle up and hold on tight for DRIVEN!
____

Thank you to Penguin Random House Audio and Putnam Books for my free copies. All opinions are my own and given voluntarily.