Literacy 2025: Book 21: William

Book
William by Mason Coile

Synopsis
Henry is a robotics expert living in a refurbished Victorian house with his pregnant wife Lily, a genius programmer and tech company CEO. Their marriage has become strained, mostly because of Henry’s crippling agoraphobia that keeps him trapped inside the house. Out of loneliness, he’s been going into the attic to work on a secret project: a highly-advanced, self-aware robot named William. But he suspects that something has gone horribly wrong with his creation, as William is cruel and manipulative, as if he’s been possessed by some dark, nihilistic force of destruction. When Lily brings some of her work colleagues to meet Henry, the four soon find themselves trapped inside the high-tech house with the evil robot and whatever dark entity wants all of them dead.

Notes
This is a very quick and easy read with short, propulsive chapters; I sped through the first several chapters one night and finished it on a short plane flight the next day.

Unfortunately, the dialogue is clunky and amateurish, the characters are extremely shallow, most of the conversations are frustratingly circular since the author doesn’t want to give too much away, and the events are still almost completely predictable. After less than 50 pages, I’d already predicted everything that was going to happen, and I was about 95% correct.

There are a couple of good horror story moments, and I was compelled to reach the ending without ever being tempted to abandon it. On the whole, it feels like the novelization of an episode of a Syfy Channel horror anthology series that almost certainly never existed.

Verdict
A quick but disappointing read, with just enough forward momentum, and just enough of an interesting concept at the end, to keep it from feeling like a waste of time. It’s too bad that so many of the concepts are so familiar that it becomes completely predictable. People have been doing smart-house-out-of-control stories since at least 1999, and of course evil robot stories for far longer, but the idea of combining them with ghosts and demons is a premise that might’ve worked if the execution had been stronger.