The Coherence Files: Book One: Drift State

By Colin Linder

Mark Ellison is fifty-two years old, reasonably successful, and quietly convinced he is disappearing.

When a near-miss with a truck shakes loose something he can't name, he starts noticing the cracks. A song lyric he's certain of turns out to be wrong - except he's not wrong, the record just changed. A faucet handle vanishes overnight and returns without explanation. An old email surfaces in his own sent folder describing a major decision he has no memory of making. And then his name appears on a concert poster for a band he never joined, at a venue he remembers standing in, playing music he recognizes as his own.

Something is bleeding through.

The forum calls it identity interference. His wife Diane calls it obsession. Mark calls it the only evidence he has that somewhere, in some other arrangement of the same life, a louder version of himself kept going - kept the music, took the risks, followed the road he stepped off at thirty-two when reasonable seemed safer than real.

Drift State is a quiet horror novel about the choices we bury, the versions of ourselves we leave behind, and what happens when they start leaving evidence.

For fans of Dark Matter by Blake Crouch and the unsettling domestic tension of Paul Tremblay, this is a story about one man's midlife crisis - and the creeping, documented, impossible possibility that he might be right.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GR5QPRTS
• ISBN13: 9798250665902
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 372 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.8" x 6.0"