Ever wondered what a modern haunted house story would look like? That's what Canadian author Andrew Pyper imagines in his latest novel, William, written under the pseudonym Mason Coile.

William follows an engineer named Henry who creates an artificially intelligent consciousness in his house called William. Henry has agoraphobia and stays working on the half-formed robot in the attic but doesn't tell anyone that it exists — not even his pregnant wife Lily.

But when Lily's co-workers show up, Henry decides to introduce things to William and things go very wrong.

"William started out for me as questions that nobody else seemed to be asking about AI, specifically its spiritual possibilities," said Pyper in an email.

"For instance, if human beings have a soul that continues in the afterlife because we experience desire and pain and love, and AI has reached a point where it experiences those same things, then what kind of afterlife might it have? And then the follow-up that had me hooked: how would an AI ghost story differ from any we've heard before?"

Mason Coile is a pseudonym of the Toronto writer. Pyper is the author of novels including Lost Girls, which won the Arthur Ellis Award for best first novel in 2000, The Demonologist, The Only Child and The Homecoming.

The "psychological horror meets cyber noir" novel William will be released on Sept. 10, 2024. You can read an excerpt below.

Every morning felt like Henry's first. Perhaps it came from working with code so much, the detailed sequence of inconsequential numbers that resulted in something coming to life, something that had never existed before. Perhaps it was because his aversion to leaving the house had grown so severe that he'd long given up trying, so he was left with only one wonder within his reach. Lily. The woman sitting in the chair next to his bed, smiling in the lovely, vaguely haunted way he sometimes sees as a side effect of overwhelming love, and other times as merely pity.

"That was a bad one," she says.

"Was I snoring?"

"You were nightmaring. You woke up like I fired a gun next to your ear."

"Did you?"

Her glasses are round and too large for her face in a way Henry finds heartbreaking. She pushes them up hard against her brow.

"What was the dream about?"

"It was the same one," he says. "More or less."

"Tell me."

"Why? Dreams are stupid. Don't we have other things—"

"Dreams tell us who we are," his wife says, and pulls the chair an inch closer, taps at her chin with doctorly interest.

"Don't you think we could all use some help with that?"

He hears the "all" as meaning himself. He could use some help with knowing who he is. It's a very Lily thing to say: superficially supportive, curious, passively superior. His desire for her to stay here with him is so great he forgives her for making him feel like an anecdote, something she might later share with friends for their amusement. Or worse, their sympathy.

"It's our house. This house," Henry says. "I'm moving through the halls like I'm not in control of my limbs. Just drifting, you know?"

"Sure."

"And I'm going up the stairs to the second floor. That's when I start to get scared."

"Are you scared of—"

"Not it. Not exactly."

"So it's—"

"A sense. Like I know something bad is coming but I can't prevent it."

"And you can't wake up."

"I can't do anything except go where I have to go."

"The attic."

"The stairs to the attic, yeah. That's where I stop. Looking up at the door. Except it's different from the real door. This one is covered in chains and padlocks, top to bottom. Like whoever put them there didn't think there was enough of them so kept adding more and more."

There's no way to predict what will catch Lily's interest, and what will cause her to wander off and leave him to what she calls his "pet projects." Henry often feels like there's an undiscovered vein of conversation that might keep her with him longer, maybe even bring her back for good, if he could only stumble on the right topic or theme. He's made the mistake in the past of thinking she wants him to be more entertaining. But after trying to mimic the charm of the leading men in the movies she likes, he saw how she found him the least engaging when he was working the hardest at it. It makes him want to ask what she found most attractive about him before they were married — whatever quality he still possesses that he could try to magnify — but he worries she'll say she's forgotten.

"Then what?" she says.

"I hear a voice behind the door."

"Its voice."

"Yeah."

"But you couldn't hear what it was saying."

"When I've had the dream before I couldn't. But this time I could."

She sits straighter. "What was it?"

"It was quoting something. Lines from a book. A poem or novel. Maybe the Bible? Something it had memorized. It wasn't kidding around about it either."

"What do you mean?"

"The words weren't its own, but they were the truth of its being. Like another voice speaking through it."

"What did the voice say?"

"'I am the spirit of perpetual negation. For all things that exist deserve to perish.'"

"You remembered that?"

"I guess it was memorable."

"Shit." She shivers. A stagy gesture that builds into a genuine shudder. "Perpetual negation. Kinda grim, Henry."

"I wasn't appreciating the meaning of it as it happened. Only that, whatever it was, it meant it."

"At least that woke you up."

"No, that's not what did it."

"What did?"

The locks won't hold. That's what Henry recalls feeling, but he doesn't say it, because he doesn't want to frighten Lily. Every chain and padlock in the world would make no difference. Because what terrified him wasn't the thing on the other side of the wood, but the new thing that had joined it. A presence that will not be contained.

"A whisper," Henry says instead. "But when I got closer I heard it wasn't a whisper. It was a hand. Fingers stroking the inside of the door. And then — boom! — something smashed against it. Hard enough to split the wood. That's what woke me up."

Lily shudders again. "Well, you're here now."

"Where else would I be?"

"Good one," she says, and nods with a mixture of humour and sadness that he thinks of as her trademark, though sometimes wonders if he's reading it wrong. If maybe he always has. "Good one."

Copyright: Excerpt from William by Mason Coile, copyright © 2024 by Andrew Pyper Enterprises, Inc. Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.