THE GRIN IN THE REARVIEW

The bar was closed. The rider was waiting anyway. Kevon Drake drives Atlanta at night because the money is only there after midnight. Three rides from the end of his shift, a man in a dark suit gets in the back seat of his Impala, says nothing, and smiles at him in the rearview mirror - a smile too wide for a human face. At the drop-off, the passenger leans into the window and whispers a promise: "This will be a night you never forget." Ten minutes later, a new ping. The same man. A different name. Then a third. Three rides is all it takes. After the third, the passenger doesn't need the car anymore. He's in the bathroom mirror fogged by a shower nobody took. He's under the streetlight outside Kevon's window, closer every night by the width of a sidewalk. He's in the black screen of a phone with the battery pulled out. He's on Kevon's mother's porch in Vine City, asking after a father who vanished in 1998 - saying he's a friend of the family, saying he's been waiting on the Drakes a long time, and smiling the entire time he talks. The old woman who reads for the forgotten gives the thing its name: the Fare. Not a ghost - a passenger. Something that can't move through a city on its own and needs a driver who accepts it. The rules are simple and pitiless: a tapped Accept is consent. Three rides seals the covenant. And a fare that has been carried has to be paid. Kevon has spent four years behind the wheel assuming the debt is his to pay and the price is his life. Both are wrong. Nine drivers have already disappeared inside the Perimeter, all last seen between 3:00 and 3:33 a.m. - the dead mile, when you're not supposed to look at your own face in the mirror. A homicide detective working the disappearances starts to believe him, which only makes her eligible. His best friend borrows the car for one night to prove it's nothing, and is found at dawn with his hands still at ten and two. And in a Union City nursing home, a man who drove a MARTA bus in 1974 explains the only way out with the warmth of a man giving directions: you don't kill it. You give it a new driver. What Kevon doesn't know is that the covenant isn't his. It's his family's - a debt handed down through the Drakes for three generations, bought and paid for by a father who didn't walk out in 1998. He got in the back seat. Some passengers don't want a ride. They want a driver. THE GRIN IN THE REARVIEW is a working-class horror novel set in an exact, loving, after-midnight Atlanta - Waffle House booths at 3 a.m., airport queues, the Ponce corridor, the smell of a car at hour eleven. A book about gig work and generational debt, about the things poor men carry so their families don't have to, and about the last ride a driver ever takes. For readers of Stephen Graham Jones, Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, and Grady Hendrix. "Kept me up until 3 a.m. - then made me afraid of my own rearview mirror." - advance reader