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| photo: Andrew Pyper | |
Mason Coile is the sci-fi/horror pseudonym for Andrew Pyper. Pyper is the author of 10 novels, including The Demonologist, which won the International Thriller Writers Award, and Lost Girls, which was a New York Times bestseller. Oracle, his audio-only thriller performed by Joshua Jackson, was a number one bestseller in the U.S. and the most listened to fiction audiobook in Canada the year of its release. William (Putnam), Coile's first novel, is part psychological horror, part cyber noir, a haunted house story in which the haunting is by AI.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
The story of a brilliant engineer who builds a DIY robot that self-identifies as the world's first AI demon. And who's to say it's wrong?
On your nightstand now:
I just finished my good friend Nick Cutter's new novel, The Queen, which contains some of the most inventive, detailed, gorgeously gross body horror you could ask for. Up next is On Writing and Failure by Stephen Marche (another friend), which surveys all the ways one can write and feel like a loser. Given the topic, it's an astonishingly short book.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I have little memory of there being many "books for children" around our house growing up, so I was reaching for the adult lit sooner than I likely should have (and certainly before I could fully understand it). So while it may not qualify as my favorite children's book, I would assign the Most Influential Book of My Youth Award to Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot. The town in King's novel was so much like my own, which made it way too easy to imagine the homes, schools, and streets outside my bedroom window seething with vampires. It terrified me and made me skittish as a racehorse. My mother forbade any more "scary stuff." Of course, her warnings were ignored. I was all in.
Your top five authors:
Margaret Atwood. Henry James. Stephen King. Martin Amis. Shirley Jackson.
Book you've faked reading:
Jane Austen's Emma saved me a lot of money I might have otherwise had to spend on sleeping pills in university, as every attempt to dig into it left me drowsy and distracted. For the exam I ended up watching the Gwyneth Paltrow movie and pretending I'd finished the book, all of which had the added side benefit of my falling into a deep crush on Gwynnie.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Come Closer by Sara Gran. A swift novel about demonic possession that shifts seamlessly from funny to suspenseful to horrific to heartbreaking. There are scenes that feel like terrible dreams invading the main character's reality--which the reader realizes (too late), are in fact dreams invading their own reality.
Book you've bought for the cover:
There are oh-so-many horror novels and thrillers I bought from the spinning drugstore rack in my hometown that were all about the lurid, sexy, irresistible covers. The Rats by James Herbert, Jaws by Peter Benchley, Hell House by Richard Matheson come to mind, though it's all a gold-foiled, pulpy blur.
Book you hid from your parents:
Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews. It was famous among my schoolmates for the sex it contained, and famous among parents for the kind of sex it contained. Looking back on it, the thrill of hiding that book was probably more fun than actually reading it.
Book that changed your life:
I think they all have, in their ways (at least the good ones). But I will give the top honor to The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I know, I know. It's regarded as a little stale these days, and it's a common answer to this question for readers (mostly men?) of a certain age. But the truth is, it did blow me away when I first read it as a small-town adolescent with dreams of living an authentic, unconstrained life. The idea of being surrounded by fakes, of searching for selfhood while grappling with loneliness: the 13-year-old me was right there.
Favorite line from a book:
"All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.' " --F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Five books you'll never part with:
My prized first editions. Joseph Conrad's Within the Tides. Henry James's The Europeans. Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye (signed!). James Dickey's Deliverance. Andrew Pyper's Lost Girls (my first novel, forgive me).
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
This is a tough one! I'm going to say Peter Straub's Ghost Story. It opened my mind to the ways that horror could be literary and attentive to character and setting with the same effectiveness as delivering involving, deeply psychological scares.