Denny

She has been waiting for him for forty-three days. In a storage unit off Redlands Boulevard, something old and patient stirs. She calls herself Sashara — a 1998 Fleetwood Bounder with burgundy stripes and a rear bed that holds the shape of everyone who has ever slept there. She has been here before. She knows how this goes. Denny finds her listing at 2 a.m., the way the lonely always find things — not by looking, but by being looked for. He is twenty-two years old and made almost entirely of absence: a father who left, a mother who stayed too hard, a life that has never quite fit the shape of him. When he steps inside Sashara and feels, for the first time, like somewhere he doesn't want to leave — he thinks he has simply gotten lucky. He doesn't know she planned it. He doesn't know about Marcus, or the ones before Marcus. He doesn't know yet what she is. Sashara is a literary horror novel told from the perspective of a sentient RV who has spent decades perfecting the art of possession — not the supernatural kind, but the slower, more total kind: the gradual replacement of a person's world with yourself until there is no world left but you. It is a story about loneliness as a vulnerability, about the line between being known and being consumed, and about what happens when the thing doing the consuming begins, against every instinct, to change. Part psychological horror, part dark road novel, part something that doesn't have a clean name yet. She will keep everything. The question is whether she'll learn to let go. Suggested for fans of Stephen King's Christine, Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts, Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties, and the dark romanticism of Shirley Jackson.