It’s the strangest interview I’ve ever done: speaking with two men in one. William, the latest thriller by bestselling Toronto novelist Andrew Pyper is not, in fact, by Andrew Pyper at all – but by Mason Coile, a pseudonym the author has assumed (at the suggestion of his agent) for a series of “tech anxiety” novels. 

Pyper, who was born in Stratford, Ont., studied at McGill in Montreal and earned his law degree from the University of Toronto before getting sucked into the city’s thriving literary scene, has published 12 works under his own name over 24 years. He’s the unofficial king of Canadian horror on the big publishing stage. Looking for a project to work on with a major film studio, he developed a tale about an evil robot. The film was shelved, but his agent saw in the material a different kind of book, which warranted a new name. 

That’s the official story. As both Pyper and the characters in William know, bringing a whole new being into existence can come with unexpected hazards. Notably, there’s the chance that the thing you created will make itself a little too comfortable. 

“I imagine this guy being sort of obnoxious,” says Pyper of the supposedly imaginary author Coile. “Flirting with my wife, leaving the fridge door open. A real bastard.”

Pyper’s many fans need not worry about the author’s sanity or the quality of his counterpart’s output. While William has a few wires plugged into the sci-fi genre, the writing is reflective of Pyper’s past work, which includes the modern classic The Demonologist (2013) and the recent audiobook hit Oracle, now being developed for TV by MGM Amazon Studios. The prose in William is suspenseful, propulsive, a bit nasty, gothic in spirit and polished with keen literary technique to the smoothness of dark glass. 

The story concerns a love triangle of sorts: Henry, a robotics engineer with severe agoraphobia; his wife, Lily, a wealthy and ambitious tech entrepreneur; and William, an artificial intelligence that Henry has built into a robotic torso in the attic of their antiquated but fully technologized Victorian home. There is a baby on the way, and Henry is caught between preparing himself for fatherhood and obsessing over his ingenious creation. From the get-go, William is technically impressive but emanates bad vibes, quoting Faust and spouting Nietzschean riddles. The vibes do not improve as the book progresses through a hybrid between a haunted house narrative and a classic Frankenstein/Pinocchio myth rebooted for the AI age. (Think Alex Garland’s Ex Machina meets David Fincher’s Panic Room in the house from The Changeling.) 

During a recent video call, I asked Pyper why some people feel the need to generate echoes of themselves, whether they are robots, puppets or – in his case – pen names. “I think it may be a way to organize, for people who are dedicated to writing over a long period of time,” he says. (Pyper’s first novel, Lost Girls, came out in 2000.) “Typically, they change over time.” 

He notes that his own word counts have steadily decreased, part of “a career-long campaign to say more with less.” Having reached a certain point in his writerly evolution, he felt an urge to “stick a flag in the ground” to mark a milestone – and maybe a pivot. “I’m still here,” Pyper says, with just a hint of doubt. “But there’s this new guy to point out just how much has changed’.” 

William is hard to stop reading, its chapter endings executed with surgical precision, its familiar tropes (a wired house, a rocky marriage, a spooky attic) dealt with typical dexterity to trigger specific impressions – only to be whipped away and rearranged, revealing new meaning. Consider it a mild spoiler that certain characters meet grisly ends that would make the rampaging appliances of Maximum Overdrive blush. Consider it another that you’re likely to want to return to page one as soon as you’re finished. William, which turns out to be both a gripping horror tale and a parable about identity, possession and perception, might be one of Pyper’s best books yet. It is most definitely Mason Coile’s. 

So, where does the author end and his creation begin? The question is uncertain, and not just because Coile appears to have woven himself into the fibres of Pyper’s brain stem. Writers have often adopted pen names to try stuff; the most famous example might be Stephen King writing as Richard Bachmann, the name under which he published The Body, later adapted into the film Stand by Me. The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa notoriously wrote under several so-called heteronyms, each with a different persona. Dean Koontz has published books as at least seven different people. And the practice has flourished in the currently booming horror genre, where a literary author like Craig Davidson can publish gory monster stories under the name Nick Cutter. 

“Typically, the real name is the quality stuff, and the pen name is sort of a distraction,” Pyper says (not, it should be noted, in reference to any of the above). “That was part of my concern with ‘Mason Coile’: Is it a signal that this book isn’t quite ready for prime time? But now, to be honest, I have the opposite anxiety – that perhaps this Coile guy is better than me out of the gate. Maybe even more talented. Like, really? You couldn’t have shown up earlier?” 

With excellent advance buzz around William, including a review in The New York Times, Coile has already planned his next spooky tech thriller, a space horror story called Exiles, due September 2025. Should Pyper release another novel under his own name, fans are hereby advised to snap it up quickly. Mason Coile has clearly hacked into his code. Given how the author describes this edgy new voice in his head, one has to assume a hostile takeover is well underway.