When I was young, my mother would sometimes be driving me to school and suddenly forget where she was supposed to be going.
She’d simply keep driving.It wasn’t that she didn’t know where she was or how to drive. She’d just become so absorbed in the routine of driving that, for a few moments, she’d forgotten why she was behind the wheel in the first place.
Years later, when I was working as a traveling salesman, I experienced something similar myself.
I’d be driving down a highway, sometimes for hours, and suddenly realize I couldn’t remember the last several miles. I knew I’d been driving. Obviously, I hadn’t run off the road. But where had my mind been during those missing minutes?
It’s a phenomenon sometimes called white line fever, or highway hypnosis.
Most people have experienced some version of it. You travel a familiar route, arrive at your destination, and realize you barely remember getting there.
For years, I thought of it as nothing more than an odd little trick of the human brain.
But eventually, I began wondering.
What if something actually happened during those missing moments?
And what if the reason we couldn’t remember was that we weren’t supposed to?
That question eventually became the foundation of my latest novel, STATIC.
I began imagining a flash of white light appearing just before an automobile accident. A terrible crash. Twisted metal. People seriously injured, perhaps even killed.
Yet one person walks away without a scratch.
A miracle, everyone says.
But what if it wasn’t a miracle?
What if the accident was part of something much more sinister?
In STATIC, that flash of white light marks the moment an alien intelligence takes control of a human being. The person survives the accident physically unchanged. Same face. Same voice. Same memories.
But the consciousness that once occupied that body is gone.
And something else has taken its place.
The more I developed the idea, the more disturbing the possibilities became.
We’ve all seen science-fiction stories about alien invasions. Massive spacecraft hovering over cities. Military forces scrambling to defend humanity. Explosions, destruction, and an enemy everyone can recognize.
But I wanted to explore a different kind of invasion.
What if the aliens didn’t need to attack us? What if they could simply become us?
In STATIC, FBI Special Agents Kate Jamison and Blake Thompson arrive in the small desert town of Red Canyon, Arizona, to investigate a series of mysterious disappearances.
There they encounter Sheriff Deacon Mallory, whose own mother vanished without explanation twenty-two years earlier.
As the investigation unfolds, they begin to uncover evidence of something far more dangerous than missing persons or unexplained automobile accidents.
An invasion that has been underway for decades.
An enemy that doesn’t need armies.
An enemy that looks just like us.
And perhaps the most frightening possibility of all is that some of these replacements have already found their way into positions of influence and power.
I won’t tell you where the story goes from there. That’s something I’d rather readers discover for themselves.
But I will tell you that the idea behind STATIC began with something as ordinary as a mother forgetting she was driving her son to school, and a salesman wondering where his mind had wandered during a long stretch of highway.
Sometimes the most unsettling stories begin with the simplest questions.
And sometimes those questions stay with you long enough to become a novel.
STATIC is now available. If you enjoy suspense, science fiction, conspiracy, and a story that might make you think twice about the world around you, I hope you’ll give it a read.
And the next time you see a terrible accident where someone miraculously walks away unharmed, you might find yourself wondering.
What if the accident wasn’t an accident?
— Dan
