Psychological horror meets cyber noir in this delicious, one-sitting read—a haunted house story in which the haunting is by AI.
She asked me what I was. I showed her.
Henry is a brilliant engineer who, after untold hours spent in his home laboratory, has achieved the discovery of his career—he has created artificially intelligent consciousness. He calls the half-formed robot William.
No one knows about William. Henry’s agoraphobia keeps him inside the house, and his fixation on William keeps him up in the attic, away from everyone, including his pregnant wife, Lily.
When Lily’s coworkers show up one day, wanting to finally meet Henry and see the new house, the smartest-of-smart-homes, things start to go wrong. William can “talk” to the house, and it turns out he’s not a fan of visitors–especially not the man who seems to know Lily a little too well. Soon Henry and Lily discover the security upgrades they wanted to keep danger out are even better at locking people in.
* Indie Next Pick for September 2024
“A smart home turns into a house of horrors in this suspenseful outing… Coile expertly imagines the sort of ghoulish snares a cybernetic environment could spring upon its unprepared captives and throws in a late-inning explanation for the source of William’s apparent sociopathy that is as believable as it is chilling. It’s a frightening Frankenstein fable for the age of AI.” — Publishers Weekly