The Passenger

Daniel Reed has driven the same long-haul routes for seventeen years. He knows the weight of his truck, the pitch of the engine, the shape of his own life down to the smallest habit. Then something begins riding in the passenger seat. A coolness. A presence. A patience with no hurry to it at all. It isn't trying to kill him. It's doing something worse. Night by night, mile by mile, it is learning him - his handwriting, his voice, the texture of how the people who love him recognize him - and building a copy from the inside, a version of Daniel Reed accurate enough to take his place.
His only defense is the web of people who truly know him: a daughter who can feel when his weight is wrong, an ex-wife who keeps the photographs, a dispatcher who remembers, a friend who names him back. To stay himself, Daniel has to be known - completely, and out loud - before the thing in the seat finishes becoming him. The Passenger is a quiet, accumulating horror about identity, attention, and the people who hold us to ourselves.
For readers who like their dread patient, their characters real, and their scares earned rather than splattered.