Category: Pop

Album Reviews 24/10/31

Janet Devlin, Emotional Rodeo (Ok!Good Records)

Regardless of genre, it’s not often that I encounter an artist who actually seems to be having fun with what they’re doing. I realize that modern country-pop stars, particularly female ones, are basically required to exhibit positivity and all that stuff (see Pickler, Kellie), but this girl does have her some fun, tabling neo-honky-tonk stompers like the newest single “Red Flag” (whose lyrics argue that people shouldn’t be hypervigilant for warning signs in new relationships, at least up to a point, which I’m on board with, given that I personally never dated anyone for whom I didn’t have a few dozen pointed questions within 10 minutes of meeting them; it’s really basic stuff) and Walmart-radio face-punchers like the title track. OK, at least the vibe here isn’t pseudo-heavy metal, and the bluegrass-dobro parts do seem genuine enough. This will be a big one if you’re into ladies in cowboy hats, folks, don’t miss out. Lots of non-annoying fun. Oh, before I forget, she’s Irish by the way. A+

Haujobb, The Machine In The Ghost (Dependent Records)

Bit of a surprising one, this. Last time I checked in with this German electro-goth duo — jeez, 2011’s New World March — they’d abandoned their hope of becoming the next Skinny Puppy or Front Line Assembly in favor of chasing a more danceable sound. That more or less sent them to the back of the bus as far as the black leather vampire crowd was concerned; obviously joy isn’t part of the equation. However, this marks a return to their darkwave-loving roots, with somewhat mixed results, not that it’s all that bad really: Here they’ve embraced the goth-club trend of throwing movie samples, stompy industrial lines and borderline cheesy synths into a Cuisinart and barely checking the results, or so it seems at first listen. The riffing does get infectious, but first you have to get past the overuse of post-apocalyptic atmospherics that seem to introduce every song. That stuff’s been done to death, but sure, it’s nice to hear it done by these guys, who obviously do have an interest in keeping bodies on the dance floor. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• This can’t be, homies, it’s November already, the next new-album-Friday is Nov. 1, please stop and let me get to the beach just one more time before hopelessness descends upon the land! You know, people love to get on my Facebook and grill me about stuff like “Is there anything that you actually like?” but it’s really hard for me to say on social media, given that it’s so impersonal. Why bother? If I express an opinion, like, say, “I never need to hear another song from Bowie or Queen ever again,” these people act like I kicked their dog, so usually I try to — no, actually I won’t lie to you guys, yes, I do say things just to cause trouble, especially on Facebook. See, to me, the only reason to use social media in the first place is to see what you can get away with. For instance, I don’t actively hate The Beatles, I’m just sick of them after listening to them for half a century (I loved Abbey Road when I was the only kid on my block who was actually listening to the whole thing) (I do hate Queen, though; aside from the opera stuff, their song structures are hilariously awful). In short, my real strategy is to get my invisible friends on social media to go listen to music that wasn’t released back when every car had a cigarette lighter. Like everyone else I’m selectively hypocritical about it, of course, take for example my positive regard for edgy-ish ’80s bands like The Cure, whose new album, Songs Of A Lost World, is on the way to the “record stores” or the 7-Elevens or wherever people buy physical albums these days. Cure singer Robert Smith is of course a sad insane clown these days (did you see his performance at the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame a couple of years ago, how does stuff like that even happen), and yes, there was his “All I Want” period, when he’d obviously decided to write nothing but bad songs for whatever reason. But no, it’s still The Cure, and I am now listening to the new single, “Alone!” And so much for that, it’s pretty disappointing, sort of a Las Vegas-ready ballad that drags on. Maybe the album’s other songs are fine, I don’t know!

• Peter Perrett is the singer for British new wave band the Only Ones, who’ve been around since 1976! His new solo album, The Cleansing, features a single titled “Disinfectant,” a mid-tempo old-school-punk tune that recalls Sex Pistols and all that sort of stuff. It’s decently annoying, go check it out if you have nothing else to do!

• Autre Ne Veut is the stage name of one Arthur Ashin, from New York City, U.S.A.! Perhaps you are one of the 9,000 people who hit Like on his most popular YouTube tune, the borderline boyband single “Age of Transparency,” an epic, listenable-enough joint when he puts away the trap drum sample and the bad singer and shoots for the rooftops. His new LP, Love Guess Who, will feature contributions from Micah Jasper (ELIO, Rebecca Black), Kris Yute and Spencer Zahn; it is his first album in seven years! The test-run single is “About To Lose,” a chill-pop number that combines Bruno Mars with Tangerine Dream in an effort that actually reads a lot better than I just made it sound; it’s fine.

• And finally, it’s English singer Beth Jeans Houghton, who makes psychedelic/garage albums under the pseudonym Du Blonde, including their forthcoming new one, Sniff More Gritty! “TV Star” showcases this person’s talents for making their hair into 1970s punk-spikes, singing like Sixpence None The Richer half the time and writing passable no-wave noise-guitar lines. It’s usable enough.

Revenge of the Tipping Point, by Malcom Gladwell

Revenge of the Tipping Point, by Malcom Gladwell (Little, Brown and Co., 368 pages)

Malcolm Gladwell had never written a book when he began, with a mix of “self-doubt and euphoria,” the manuscript that would become The Tipping Point, published in 2000. That book explored the ways in which an idea or a product will languish, until suddenly it doesn’t — ultimately becoming a “social contagion” that spreads rapidly, like contagions of disease.

The Tipping Point itself was something like that. At Gladwell’s first book event, two people showed up, a stranger and the mother of a friend. But after a while, the book “tipped” and went on to spend years on the New York Times bestseller list. At one point Bill Clinton called it “that book everyone has been talking about.”

Six other books and a podcast later, Gladwell is back to revisit the tipping point from a darker place. While The Tipping Point talks about how we can leverage the principles of social contagions to achieve a social good, Revenge of the Tipping Point posits that in this pursuit, there can be unintended negative consequences. We can tip over into something worse. Gladwell’s latest book is a cautionary tale that will appeal mainly to fans of The Tipping Point. As an author,he is something of an acquired taste. People seem to either love him or to doze off before the end of the last chapter. Let’s just say his books require an attention span.

Gladwell began his career as a journalist: first for The Washington Post, then The New Yorker. He still writes as a journalist, weaving together his own interviews and news accounts to tell stories in his own conversational voice and then to link seemingly unrelated events in the service of his own ideas. Along the way, he offers “rules” he invents to describe his views of how the world works.

Revenge of the Tipping Point follows that formula, from the quirky Gladwellian rules to the whiplash-inducing pivots between seemingly unrelated stories.

Take, for example, Gladwell’s treatment of “Poplar Grove,” a pseudonym for an affluent, homogeneous community that experienced a cluster of teen suicides (a focus of the 2024 book Life Under Pressure by Anna Mueller and Seth Abrutyn). Gladwell took his own tour of the town, finding a real estate agent who took him around and explained the dynamics of the family-oriented community. Then he linked the town’s tragedies to … a fertility crisis among cheetahs.

In this bewildering journey, readers are suddenly thrust from the leafy suburbs of domesticity to a veterinary clinic where scientists are grafting skin samples from domestic cats onto captive cheetahs, trying to figure out why breeding programs fail so spectacularly.

And then, before we even have time to get attached to our new cheetah friends, boom — we’re back in Poplar Grove.

And so it goes, while Gladwell gradually reveals the point he is trying to make, which is that in a monoculture — “a world of uniformity” — there are “no internal defenses against an outside threat.” In the case of both a “perfect” homogeneous community and cheetahs with little genetic diversity, “The best solution to a monoculture epidemic is to break up the monoculture,” Gladwell writes.

Gladwell then takes us to a community in Palo Alto, where a planned development on what was called the Lawrence Tract was supposed to solve the problem of “white flight” from American cities.

That community was developed with the stipulation that one-third of the homes be owned by whites, one-third by Blacks and one-third by Asians, in order to prevent “tipping” in the neighborhood — one ethnic group taking over the neighborhood. The word “tipping” had begun to be used in this way as neighborhoods changed by ethnicity.

“For a time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, if you used the phrase, people knew exactly what you meant,” Gladwell writes. Real estate agents would talk about “tipping a building” or “tipping a neighborhood.” They were demonstrating, as Gladwell maintains, that “tipping points can be deliberately engineered” — especially once you venture beyond “the magic third.” (Which is another Gladwellian rule.)

“People, it is clear, behave very differently in a group above some mysterious point of critical mass than they do in a group just a little below that point,” he writes. And people who know this sometimes act to manipulate the tipping in ways that aren’t in a community’s — or a country’s — best interests.

For the New England reader, there is plenty of regional interest in this book. For instance, in Gladwell’s discussion of what is known as “small-area variation” — bewildering differences in outcomes among otherwise similar areas — he examines research that took place in Middlebury, Vermont, and Randoph, New Hampshire.

Despite both towns having almost identical sociological profiles when it came to insurance, income and levels of chronic illness, there were notable differences in hospitalizations, surgery and Medicare spending, with much higher numbers in Randolph. Similarly, when looking at two Vermont towns — Waterbury and Stowe — the same pattern emerged. “The people were the same — except, that is, that the children of Waterbury tended to keep their tonsils and the children of Stowe did not.”

Gladwell also ventures into Massachusetts with his examination of why Harvard University has a rugby team — when hardly anyone goes to see the games, and the players have to be recruited outside of the U.S. — and, later, the infamous Biogen conference in Boston in February 2020 that turned into a superspreading Covid-19 event.

It is the opioid crisis, however, that Gladwell begins and ends with. He uses the saga of OxyContin and the Sackler family to argue that epidemics, both medical and social, have rules and boundaries but it is human beings who create the stories around them and it is human beings who are ultimately responsible for where epidemics go. “It’s time for a hard conversation about epidemics…. We need to be honest about all the subtle and sometimes hidden ways we try to manipulate them,” he writes.

Gladwell has said that for the 25th anniversary of The Tipping Point, he’d intended to simply update or “refresh” the original book, but decided to do the harder work of taking it into another place. That paid off for the established Gladwell fan, but it’s unclear whether he will win new ones with this complex and meandering collection of stories. B

Album Reviews 24/10/24

Sara Serpa, Encounters & Collisions (Biophilia Records)

I’m sorry, I can deal with a lot of things — improv jazz, noise-jazz, lots of things — but this just isn’t my cup of tea. That may be because I gravitate to a rather conventional Earl Grey, and sure, I appreciate that a lot of critics would tell me that this Portuguese singer is an acquired taste that’s beyond my ken, but I’m not a fan of self-indulgent sounds of any sort. This LP starts out with a spoken-word soliloquy about how her name is pronounced “SAH-rah,” not “SAIR-ah,” and some other gobbledygook I didn’t bother with, and then it’s on to an exercise in off-Broadway performance art, riding bumpily along on a purposely rickety float comprising cello, sax and piano. I’ll admit that a lot of (never-released) tension does emanate from Serpa’s constant edging toward dissonance, stuff that most normies would diagnose as being off-key. But I don’t need it, really. Your mileage may vary, of course, and if you want intimacy in your acoustic, academic-sounding chamber-jazz, this’d be it. C

Various Artists, Pulp Fiction: 30th Anniversary Soundtrack (Interscope Records)

I don’t know how anyone reading this could say they’ve never seen this 1994 movie, but then again, I’ve never watched The Shawshank Redemption or Deliverance all the way through, so there’ll be no charge for your hall pass. The soundtrack gave (more or less) rise to a surf-rock resurgence in pop culture; the film’s opening tune, Dick Dale’s “Miserlou,” starts things off here, leading into some dialog between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson (yes, the bit about how the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder is called a “Royale with cheese” in France). Next is Kool & The Gang’s stomp-funky “Jungle Boogie,” which was a pleasant surprise for me to hear on the original soundtrack; I’d listened to it quite a bit in the 1980s while writing an album and doggedly attempting to expand my spectrum of musical influence (back then, I honestly believed no one else had ever even heard the dumb thing before). Director Quentin Tarantino (nowadays #MeToo-canceled, last I checked) had a pretty bizarre range of influences himself; I never understood the appeal of Urge Overkill’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” but it’s here too. The draw here is that it’s being released on day-glo vinyl, which is as Tarantino-schlocky as things could possibly get I suppose. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Right on time, Oct. 25 will see a Friday-load of new albums, from bands, overrated synth-pop artists, and nepo babies who sing off-key! Twerking like demented circus clowns, they’ll bang their Who-boombas and clang their ba-zingas and annoy me with all the noise, noise, noise, noise! What am I to do, fam, demand hazard pay? Ask all those bad bands to take music lessons? No, there is nothing I can do but report on these new albums, so that you’ll know what to do with whatever money you have left after rent, your Roku subscription and your weekly supply of ramen noodle packets and cans of beans! But wait a second, before I whip out my Gatling gun of snark and really go to town, here’s some good news, a new album from Amyl and the Sniffers, titled Cartoon Darkness! You know, I’d thought I was the only kid on my block to admire this Australian pub-punk band, but the other week someone posted about them on my Twitter and my hope for humanity was instantly lifted juuust a little bit. Don’t know about you, but I fell in love with these criminals when I saw the video of “Some Mutts (Can’t Be Muzzled),” like, the singer makes Courtney Love look like Martha Stewart, and all I wanted out of life was to go on a Dave & Buster’s date with that girl and see how long it would take to get arrested. You people really need to go check them out, but in the meantime I’m going to see if they’re still completely feral, by checking out the video for “Chewing Gum,“ from this slappin’ new album! OK forget it, it’s awesome, she’s trying to be the next Lydia Lunch and succeeding, she’s got lipstick all over her insane rictus grin, and she’s holding a cigarette whose ash is like 2 inches long, go see this video, kids, I beg of you, you need to.

• Awesome and groovy, I’m already ahead of the holiday album curve, because your generation’s Elton John, Ben Folds, is releasing an album of Christmas songs, cleverly titled Sleigher, see what he did there! I am pleasantly amazed that the Christmas albums are already coming out, because it seemed like there weren’t any at all for me to write about here the last few years, let’s go see what this wacky piano person is doing to “Jingle Bells” or whatever. Yup, it’s good, this version of “The Christmas Song,” but let’s be real, even Gilbert Gottfried could have made that song appealing. He’ll be appearing at the Cabot Theatre in Beverly, Mass., on Nov. 10, but I’m sure the last 18 remaining tickets will have been sold by the time you read this, sorry for your loss.

• A lot of you old people remember the 1980s, when Tears for Fears was doing so many drugs that they were going around saying they were bigger than The Beatles, ha ha, remember those days? Well, they have a new live album coming out on Friday, titled Songs for a Nervous Planet! Now, don’t worry, fellow old people, Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal are still leading the band, and they still (mostly) sound like Tears For Fears as of their last album, The Tipping Point, so let’s cut to now, when they sound like a sleepy wedding band on the live version of “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” that’s on board this one. But who cares, guys, it’s Tears For Fears, amirite? I miss big poofy hair, don’t you?

• Last but not least on our plate is the new album from 1980s Boston-indie-rock legends Pixies, The Night The Zombies Came! “Motoroller” is a decent mid-tempo goth-rocker, with Frank Black doing a passable Marilyn Manson impersonation, sort of, if that’s even what he was even intending to do, who knows.

Entitlement, by Rumaan Alam

Entitlement, by Rumaan Alam (Riverhead, 288 pages)

One of the more peculiar aspects of our society is that some of us have so much money that it’s actually a challenge to get rid of it, and some of us have so little that we work multiple jobs just to keep the lights on. In a just world, the former problem would cancel out the latter, but it’s not.

Rumaan Alam tackles this paradox in Entitlement, his fourth novel, which explores the prickly issues of both money and race. It is a compelling storyline: A young Black woman is hired to work for an aging white billionaire who has established a foundation to distribute his money to worthy causes.

The fictional Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation has shades of the real-life “Giving Pledge” that many billionaires have signed. Asher Jaffee made his money with a company that delivered office supplies (“Jaffee … in a Jiffy!” was its brilliant motto). Now 83, he still has the kind of energy in which he bounds, rather than walks, and has no interest in retiring. In fact, he is more comfortable in an office than at home. “The office was the place where things happened, the place where he was necessary, the site of his every victory.”

At the foundation, Asher has a small and fiercely devoted staff that tends to his four-day work week, which is filled with people wanting to talk to him about his money.

Brooke Orr, 33, enters this world after nine years of unsatisfying work as a teacher. She is the adopted daughter of a single mom, an attorney who works in the vaguely defined field of reproductive health and who chose to raise her children with the help of three close female friends, rather than within the confines of marriage. Brooke’s own circle includes the daughter of one of her mother’s friends, Kim, and a gay man, Matthew, that they befriended while all were matriculating at Vassar College. (“As Brooke saw it, she and Kim were continuing what their mothers had started: a most modern little family.”)

When she joins the Jaffee Foundation, Brooke is doing well enough but is also in the vaguely annoying position of watching those around her seem to do even better. Her brother is engaged to be married, and though she loves him and doesn’t herself want to get married, her interactions with the couple give way to sardonic inner dialogue on “the smugness of young people who believe they have invented love.” Meanwhile, her friend Kim has recently come into an enormous inheritance, sum unknown, that has allowed her to pay cash for an apartment worth $2 million.

While Brooke loves her friend and is genuinely glad for her good fortune, the imbalance still puts a quiet strain on their relationship. After seeing the new place for the first time, “She saw Kim’s succession of Sundays in this two-bedroom apartment. She saw coffee-stained cups upside down in the dishwasher, saw flowers bought on impulse slouching on a table, saw an orange peel, dried into brittle shells, left to molder on the marble countertop. The cleaning lady would see to that. She saw comfort and solitude and joy and it looked absolutely thrilling to her. Kim was dear, Kim was good, but Kim had done nothing to deserve any of this earthly comfort. And wasn’t the universe meant to work that way, wasn’t it governed by justice?”

But Brooke is enjoying her own good fortune, in that Asher Jaffee has been impressed by their limited interactions and wants her to have more responsibility. She’s smart, and he sees this, but it’s also possible that he’s wanting to have a fatherly influence on Brooke — with her father out of the picture all of her life, and his own daughter having died in the 9/11 attacks at age 38.

Jaffee is generous with his money, his time and his advice, telling her, “Demand something from the world. Demand the best. Demand it.”

Brooke internalizes the advice and begins to change subtly as she grows into the position and assumes more responsibility. But she also uses Jaffee’s advice as justification for bad choices as she becomes more comfortable in the moneyed world and wants her share.

Alam’s previous novels include 2020’s acclaimed Leave the World Behind (which I loved and awarded a rare A+). That book also explored contemporary themes, including race. Entitlement strives, but never achieves the tension that ripples through Leave the World Behind, making it both a smart cultural critique and an old-fashioned page-turner. Nor does Entitlement convince the reader to care all that much about either Brooke or Asher and what happens to them. Brooke has a narrative arc, to be sure, but at no point in it does she want anyone to love her.

Alam’s voice is fresh and unique, and his cultural observations spot-on. While Entitlement will likely win many accolades and maybe make a short-list or two for a prestigious award, it is, like Brooke’s pre-Asher life, ultimately unsatisfying, even for a cautionary tale. B-

Album Reviews 24/10/17

Michael Des Barres, It’s Only Rock N’ Roll (Rock Ridge Music)

Most old people have heard of this dandy (that’s literally what he is; he inherited the title of Marquis from a 13th-century French ancestor) but are far more familiar with his ex-wife, Pamela, the most famous groupie in rock history. Musically he’s always been something of a non-starter; he was in Silverhead, Detective and a few other bands, and didn’t really make much of a splash before replacing Robert Palmer in Power Station just in time to front the band at the 1985 Live Aid concert. Ladies, he looks nothing like he does on this album cover nowadays, but far better for me to mock his music than that Peter Pan business. We open with “Dyna-Mite” — not the BTS tune but the MUD glam-rocker — and right off the bat I’m thinking Rocky Horror but in serious mode, you know, T. Rex all the way baby. This is supposed to be music from Des Barres’ salad days, but Slade’s “Cum On Feel The Noise” will make 99 percent of the world think of Quiet Riot and he can’t sing it for beans. Alice Cooper’s most boring song ever, “Eighteen,” gets a properly mediocre rendition. Etc. D+

HIM, When Love and Death Embrace The Best of HIM 1997-2003 (BMG Records)

Depending on whom you ask, Finland’s biggest-ever band is (usually) cited as being either Nightwish or Lordi, but this goth-metal act does get its mentions. They’ve been broken up for good since 2017, but it’s just as well I suppose, given that their heyday is celebrated in this comp, and besides, Nightwish has long since taken over their mantle. But what a time it was for these guys, back in the early days, their first one-off American appearance coming by way of none other than skateboarder/Jackass Bam Margera, and the rest is (mostly Finnish) history. Their (very Bauhaus-meets-Marilyn Manson) version of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper” is here, as is their po-faced rub of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” and it’s about at that point that most U.S. audiences check either in or out as far as what they’re familiar with insofar as this band’s oeuvre. If you ever wanted to hear Bauhaus on steroids, it’s this, however that strikes your fancy. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• This Friday, Oct. 18, is three days before my birthday, so if the gods are willing, there will be decent albums for me to listen to, so that I can bring you readers glad tidings of stuff you should be listening to, marking a double celebration! Now, you and I both know that the chances of that are pretty slim, like, the last time I checked, there weren’t going to be new albums coming out this week from, say, Wire and Skinny Puppy and Acumen Nation and Pet Shop Boys alongside recently discovered recordings of Al Jolson singing all Groucho Marx-like or Benny Goodman wailing on his clarinet like Jimmy Page before there even was a Jimmy Page, so I will roll the dice, check the list, and prepare myself for the usual nauseating stew of new albums from twerkers and nepo babies. Speaking of the latter, I was in a Target store the other day when what to my bloodshot eyes should appear but a brand new glossy magazine, titled Paris (referring to Auto-Tune-dependent singing-fraud Paris Hilton, of course) subtitled something insane like Pop Icon. I couldn’t believe it, because in the old days it used to take all sorts of payola and whatnot to get an artist on the cover of a nice glossy magazine, like Hit Parader, where rock stars were interviewed in careful fawning depth by drunken journalists so the lumpen masses could discover important things like their favorite rock star’s most-hated grade school teacher, or their favorite Skittles color. But let’s face it, local bands, we’ve entered a horrifying “nepotism era” of rock ’n’ roll, folks, so, for anyone out there with rock ’n’ roll dreams, your task is clear: Unless you are Paris Hilton and can pay Megan Thee Stallion to pretend to like you, or you’re Sabrina Carpenter and can demand a record contract or else your aunt, Nancy Cartwright, will immediately stop voicing the part of Bart Simpson on The Simpsons, you have no choice but to put out 50 albums a year like King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard and all those bands do. It’s either that or just give up and finish your degree or become a plumber if you enjoy doing things like eating food and sitting in a heated dwelling without too much survival anxiety. I did not make up these new rules, guys, and the next local musician who yells at me about it on Facebook is going to get publicly ridiculed in this column, promise not threat. But meanwhile, let’s talk about TV-talk-show houseplant Jennifer Hudson and her new album, The Gift Of Love, since no one else will! Yes, it is supposedly a holiday album, but there are other hilariously over-sung covers here, like “Nature Boy” and Aretha’s “Respect.” Hm, that’s odd, no Bad Brains songs.

• Joe Jonas was the Jonas who was with the girl from Game of Thrones, and they divorced, so apparently his lawyers advised him to make a new album, which is on the way as we speak, titled Music For People Who Believe In Love! But does he, after divorcing Sansa Stark (she actually smiles a lot now)? Who knows, but the title of this album’s first song is “Work It Out,” and it starts with 12-string noodling before descending into a Justin Timberlake romp-along with high-pitched singing. Ack.

• The (it’s threatened) “final album” from noise-rockers Japandroids, Fate & Alcohol, is a bummer, because I wish they weren’t disbanding. “D&T” is a totally cool punk-speed rocker that would make Frank Black jealous. Don’t quit, fellas!

• Finally it’s Kylie Minogue, being impossibly cougar-sexy again, with her new album, Tension II! “Lights Camera Action,” the single, is a euro-trance tune that’s pretty great when she isn’t trying to sing like Ariana Grande, stop that this instant.

William, by Mason Coile

William, by Mason Coile (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 224 pages)

Earlier this year, Ray Kurzwell gave us a cheery picture of the coming world under artificial intelligence in The Singularity is Nearer. A bone-chilling alternate view is offered in Mason Coile’s novel William, a stand-out in the nascent genre of “AI horror.”

You probably won’t want to read it right before you go to bed, but it is a perfect autumn read as the story transpires on a single day: Halloween.

The titular “William” is a half-finished robot that is the project of Henry, a brilliant agoraphobic engineer who can’t leave his home without dissolving into panic — fans of the Breaking Bad universe might think of Chuck McGill in Better Call Saul, just with a different illness and profession.

Henry has built several robotic creatures, including a dog and a creepy little magician riding a small bicycle. But William is to be his ultimate creation — the robot appears to have developed consciousness — and Henry’s preoccupation with the project seems to stem not so much from personal ambition but from distracting himself from his crumbling marriage to Lily, a wealthy computer engineer.

“Things are bad between them, but not too bad,” Henry keeps reassuring himself, even though “he worries that his assessment of the bridgeable distance between himself and his wife is an error of judgment — the same made by millions of husbands right before the end.”

Things have regressed to the point where he is sleeping in the spare room of the couple’s old but cutting-edge Victorian home, a place where windows open, water heats and doors lock via voice command, in a neighborhood where drones “buzzing like honeybees” fly overhead with deliveries all day. Lily wears glasses that are connected to her computer, allowing her to access email by blinking.

It’s the sort of smart house we can envision not too far in the future. Henry created it, like he created William, who spends his time locked in the attic reading books and listening to NPR and Broadway show tunes on a transistor radio. While he can learn and converse with Henry, his body consists only of a torso, arms and head, and he is valiantly trying to make himself mobile, even to the point of attaching wheels to his chair while Henry is away.

It’s clear that Henry’s mental illness — the onset of which is not initially explained — is contributing to the couple’s marital problems, although Lily seems to be trying to help him as best she can. On this day, she has invited two former coworkers, Paige and Davis, to the house for lunch, and as they meet we see that he’s not only agoraphobic but seriously antisocial, the kind of person whose conversation always seems awkward or haughty. (One of the first things he says to Paige, while internally noting “the wasted efforts that have gone into her appearance,” is “your sleeves are too long.”)

After a bit of this uncomfortable interaction, Henry decides the best way to get through the visit is to introduce everyone to William. Even Lily hasn’t seen him, or even been allowed into the attic at this point — she only knows that her husband has been working on conscious AI.

Henry goes up first, to warn William that he is having guests, asking him to behave — the robot has a tendency to make somewhat snarky contents, to try to psychoanalyze Henry, explain his problems. “‘Don’t worry, I’ll be sweet as pie,’ the robot says, drawing a cross over its nonexistent heart’.”

Of course, he is not. And what transpires when the four go up to the lab sets in a motion a cascade of tension that leads to full-blown horror, which is not typically the kind of fare I enjoy, either in literature or in film. But I took one for this team, and was ultimately glad I did, as a series of shocking twists in the story, and the existential questions the novel raises more than made up for the unpleasant scenes.

Mason Coile is a pen name for Canadian author Andrew Pyper, who seems to be channeling Stephen King in this story. He packs a lot to ponder in this short book, which some have described as a one-sitting read. (True only if you tend to sit for long periods.)

Pyper has said that he originally wrote William as a short story, then tried to sell it as a screenplay without success, and only turned it into a novel after the first iterations failed to sell. He seems to have found the perfect length — the novel is tightly coiled, like a snake, with just the right amount of exposition, and a punch-perfect ending. It is the sort of book you have to read twice — the second time to go back and see all the foreshadowing of events that you might have missed the first time.

It’s also the sort of book you’ll want to share and talk about it, as it raises interesting questions about the nature of AI and whether artificial intelligence is something around which human beings can really install guardrails. Even God didn’t seem to do that, as Lily observes at one point — God just created without thought to the consequences, she thinks. “If beauty or discovery was the result — if chaos was the result — it didn’t matter. It only mattered that something astonishing was born.”

I don’t like horror, but I loved this absorbing, disturbing little book. A

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