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
IN THE NEWS
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.
A much-beloved author gives a favorite recurring character her own novel.
Holly Gibney made her first appearance in print with a small role in Mr. Mercedes (2014). She played a larger role in The Outsider (2018). And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. King has said that the character “stole his heart.” Readers adore her, too. One way to look at this book is as several hundred pages of fan service. King offers a lot of callbacks to these earlier works that are undoubtedly a treat for his most loyal devotees. That these easter eggs are meaningless and even befuddling to new readers might make sense in terms of costs and benefits. King isn’t exactly an author desperate to grow his audience; pleasing the people who keep him at the top of the bestseller lists is probably a smart strategy, and this writer achieved the kind of status that whatever he writes is going to be published. Having said all that, it’s possible that even his hardcore fans might find this story a bit slow. There are also issues in terms of style. Much of the language King uses and the cultural references he drops feel a bit creaky. The word slacks occurs with distracting frequency. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn’t understand how this phrase is currently used—and has been used for quite a while. But the biggest problem is that this narrative is framed as a mystery without delivering the pleasures of a mystery. The reader knows who the bad guys are from the start. This can be an effective storytelling device, but in this case, waiting for the private investigator heroine to get to where the reader is at the beginning of the story feels interminable.
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016138
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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