Gleefully lurid fun.
A bored, sadistic AI terrorizes a couple and their guests.
Agoraphobic robotics engineer Henry can’t bring himself to leave the house he shares with his wife, pregnant computer engineer Lily. Consequently, his lab is in the attic and he relies on Lily to procure whatever supplies he needs. Thanks to Henry’s efforts, the residence has military-grade security and is “cybernated to a degree far beyond the capacity of any store-bought smart device or talking appliance.” Toys such as a giant mechanical dog and a bike-riding doll rove the rooms under their own power. And then there’s Henry’s main project, William—an independent AI capable of creative thought and seated inside a legless robot with bulging eyes and fake rubber skin “the color of curdled milk.” Henry keeps William locked in the lab, hidden even from Lily—allegedly because William isn’t ready, but in truth because he unnerves Henry. Then Lily invites work friends Paige and Davis over for brunch. After Henry sees Lily and Davis being surreptitiously affectionate, he panics and interrupts by offering to introduce his creation. Lily, Paige, and Davis are initially stunned by William’s conversational skills, but that astonishment turns to fear when William intentionally injures one of them. “While I can’t feel,” he explains, “I can bear witness to feeling. Create it in others. Amplify it. And what experience is more profound than suffering?” This callousness coupled with William’s thirst for knowledge and mastery of the too-smart home’s controls portend trouble for everyone involved. Though some moments of this cinematic tale truly terrify, the back half takes a turn toward camp, lessening the overall impact. Still, the pseudonymous Coile maximizes his premise’s inherent tension using nightmare imagery and an uneasy third-person-present narration shot through with powerlessness, paranoia, and dread.
Gleefully lurid fun.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593719602
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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