William by Mason Coile

[tricster]

A quick horror/science fiction read that I picked up because I wanted another fast-paced read. This book delivered precisely that.

William starts us with Henry, who we quickly find out is an agoraphobic roboticist. He lives with (and obsesses about) his pregnant wife, Lily, but their relationship is strained. They're sleeping in different bedrooms. Henry blames his other obsession with building William for the distance in their relationship. Henry also has a bad feeling about William; there's something off about the half-built AI robot. It seems oddly cruel, and it likes to make malicious and cryptic comments to Henry. On this day, Lily announces that she's having some friends and ex-colleagues over for dinner.

Mason Coile does an excellent job of playing the magician. There is something wrong with William, something evil. This distracts us nicely from the oddities about Henry and his relationship with Lily and their back story. Both mysteries start to unfold when Davies and Paige come over. Henry, somewhat impulsively and trying to make a good impression, invites everyone to meet William. He immediately regrets it, but he keeps hearing snippets of suggestive conversations between Lily and Davies, enough to suggest that they might be having an affair or perhaps something else.

William injures Lily, and it all starts to fall apart. As Paige takes care of Lily, Davies confronts Henry, who blacks out. When Henry comes to, Davies is nowhere to be found. We briefly wonder if William or Henry killed Davies in a fit of jealous rage. In the end, it's still unclear who exactly is the killer, as the smart home takes out Paige and then a severely injured Davies. We learn that, actually, Lily is the only human roboticist here, and Davies is her husband. Henry is her creation, a robot AI that has created this whole story of estrangement and marriage to fill in his history.

This book takes on the subject of what makes a person a person. Henry is convinced that whatever was wrong with William was because he had nothing to give his creation. Because he is an AI, he couldn't build a complete person, and that incompleteness left William open to being possessed by something dark and evil. Two hundred twenty-four pages are not quite enough to go in-depth into this train of thought, but it asks some interesting, if unanswerable, questions. But you could also take this as William was an expression of some part of Henry that Lily had suppressed. William seems aware throughout the story that Lily has created Henry. In the end, neither robot actually lifts a hand to kill any of the humans; it is the smart house. Who was really controlling it, though? Was it William? Or was it all actually Henry trying to come to terms with the fact that his creator was withdrawing because she was about to have a human child?
Final Review: ⭐⭐⭐
It's a quick read and raises some interesting questions, but given its page count, it seems to try too hard to be philosophical and profound.