To create an almost human is to create a monster. So speculative writers have suggested since Mary Shelley. The advent of artificial intelligence has only given this gothic dread fresh urgency. Haunted by the question of whether consciousness can be trapped on a circuit board, we seem incapable of inventing machines in our own image without imagining those machines attacking us.
The uncanny aspect of A.I. is front and center in “William,” Mason Coile’s slim, gripping novel about the horror of watching software embrace its will to power. The title character is a robot built to house an experimental A.I. The intelligent William quotes Goethe’s Mephistopheles and speaks with an eloquence at odds with its grotesque, rudimentary appearance: “Bulging eyes, round as marbles. Ears the size of ashtrays, the color of curdled milk.”
Mouthy and creepy in equal measures, William recalls the living ventriloquist dummies in classic chiller films such as “Magic” and “Dead of Night.” The robot’s confidence far outstrips that of its creator, Henry, who suffers from an agoraphobia that makes him dependent on his pregnant wife, Lily. She, William and a menagerie of smaller robotic creatures are Henry’s only companions in a Victorian house that has been fully “cybernated,” all its functions controlled by a C.P.U. What could possibly go wrong?
Mason Coile is an open pseudonym of Andrew Pyper, the award-winning Canadian author of such thrillers as “The Demonologist.” Here, he has crafted a cyber-horror tale that combines cerebrality and carnage, a twist on “The Shining” in which the house is haunted by a ghost in the machine.
Like many protagonists of domestic horror tales, Henry is a husband who feels woefully unequipped to play the traditional role of protector to his wife and future offspring. From the beginning, he exhibits a quasi-comical insecurity, altering his speech to appeal to Lily’s wandering attention and his gait to appear to be “a man in control. A man headed off to reassert normalcy in his home. A man.”
Where Jack Torrance had a phantom bartender to tempt him toward evil, Henry has his robot. A quick study of human nature, William taunts its creator with Nietzschean exhortations to seize control of his home. When Lily invites two visitors to brunch — one of them a handsome man who arouses Henry’s jealousy — the robot picks up on its maker’s discomfort, and its rhetoric grows more sinister. “All those moral evaluations — they’re handcuffs. You could be free of them like that … if you chose to be, brother.”
Coile doesn’t make us wait to find out what “freedom” means to William. As the brunch escalates rapidly into something more horrifying, the author pulls out a raft of reliable genre devices: a living doll, phantom phenomena on a baby monitor, a smart home turned inescapable trap. The action is cinematic, complete with jump scares and bloodshed sufficient to satisfy any gore hound.
Shopworn as these elements are, Coile elevates them with meticulously unsettling prose and a knowing dissection of character that transcends stereotype. The present-tense narrator is an inchoate, brooding presence like William itself, revealing just enough of each character’s interiority to provoke empathy — and terror.
Like Victor Frankenstein and so many other intrepid fictional scientists, Henry will discover too late that “there are limits to how much reason can insulate you from hurt.” Readers who expect the story to affirm Henry’s flailing masculinity or William’s bloodthirsty anarchy will find that Coile gives the novel a far subtler final turn.
Midway through the novel, Henry proposes that to create anything or anyone is to create “a space. An absence inside the presence. Kind of like building a ship and launching it out to sea but without anything stored in the hold.” Out of that void, evil can arise as easily as good. “William” plumbs that space brilliantly.
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