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With monsters in horror, there's an intriguing paradox that I'm going to call The Bestie Paradox. That is, even though an entity is a monster leaving a trail of bodies in their wake, there are still redeemable aspects about them that, well, make you want to be friends with them. Just imagine how fun it would be to go to Marg Night at your local bar with Candyman, the girl from Eyes Without a Face, David from Prometheus, Carrie, Frankenstein's Monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, M3gan, even Pumpkinhead. I mean this all in jest, of course, because I prefer not to keep company with murderers, but you can catch my drift here.

On the other end of The Bestie Paradox are the villains who I wouldn't want to hang out with, even if they were the last person on the planet. These are your Freddy Kruegers, the kids from The Brood, the kids from The Village of the Damned, Klaus Kinski, the witches from Suspiria, the samurai oni from Exhuma, literally any character from every movie directed by Eli Roth. A character I'm going to add to this list now is a doll-sized fella named William from Mason Coile's novel, W1ll1am, who likes to ride around on a bicycle in a wizard hat. 

Enter William, the doll-sized villain in W1ll1am

W1ll1am, like M3gan, is a horror story set in the domestic sphere, with AI at the center of it all. It tells the story of an agoraphobic engineer named Henry and his wife Lily, a computer scientist, who get progressively creeped out by a tiny android Henry has built called William. From the get-go, there's something off about William. He stares at Henry for too long, like there's some inside joke between them, and Lily can't stand the sight of him. Given that Henry and Lily's relationship has been on the rocks for some time now, William certainly isn't helping things. 

There's a cinematic scale to W1ll1am's story that practically begs you to read it in one go, the same way that you'd consume a movie like M3gan. But beyond the novel's short length, the bulk of the plot unfolds during one faithful night, when Lily's coworkers come over to her and Henry's house for dinner. William, not one to let an opportunity to cause chaos slip away, decides to make his problem with Henry everyone else's problem that night. You can sing 'William, It Was Really Nothing' by The Smiths to William all you want, that little robot freak isn't going to listen. 

W1ll1am makes M3gan look reasonable

Without giving too much away, W1ll1am functions wonderfully as an ad for never converting your home into a "smart home." Or "upgrading" mechanical stalwarts like door latches or doorknobs into a sleeker alternative that requires electricity. As William continues his rampage on Henry and Lily's dinner guests, the AI overrides the voice commands that Henry and Lily have in place for various controls within the house - be it water temperature in their shower, their bathroom door, and more. Absolute nightmare fuel, right? Listen, I'm not exactly living in an Amish community here, but W1ll1am made me feel enormously glad that some of my hobbies - like reading - take place completely offline. 

While with M3gan, we can extract a certain amount of glee from watching horrible tech bros get murked by a little dancing diva, but in W1ll1am, the AI gives us hardly anything to cheer about. M3gan may have wanted to help her family at one point, but W1ll1am seems dead set on pushing Henry's buttons from the very beginning. Ol' W1lly is like that one attention-starved kid in your elementary school class who won't stop bothering you because even negative attention is better than none. In that sense, William isn't that different from some adult men we have roaming around the most powerful offices in our country today. Goodness gracious. 

Don't get me wrong, I liked W1ll1am and think you should read it! I also like M3gan too, but W1ll1am is more of a "feel bad" story. If you're like me, and see the first two Alien movies as the perfect ad for staying the hell home, then W1ll1am is right up your alley. In the end, it provides a comforting validation of my relationship with technology. I carry around a cracked iPhone 8 in my pocket and have no plans of upgrading it because I don't want to ever "like" my cellphone or admire what it can do. My phone will never be "besties" with me, nor will any AI like William. 

The world is such a dark place right now that reading a horror story that validates my worldview is perhaps what I've needed all along. 

Just like yourself, the Popverse staff spends a whole lot of time with our respective noses in respective books. It's why we've come up with stuff like:

• The hottest upcoming fiction
• Queer romance to add to your reading list
• A reading guide to Cassandar Clare's Shadowhunter Chronicles

...and a whole lot more. Join our metaphorical library, won't you? There are no late fees and you can be as loud as you want, so long as the people you live with are OK with it.