Henry wakes with a jolt on Halloween morning in “William,” Mason Coile’s “debut” (it’s Canadian writer Andrew Pyper’s first book under that pen name).

“You were nightmaring,” his pregnant wife, Lily, says from a chair next to his bed. “You woke up like I fired a gun next to your ear.”

“Did you?” he asks.

Henry and Lily are engineers. He specializes in robotics, she in computers. He’s agoraphobic, and she is not. Their differences are causing strain in their marriage: “At some point along the way they agreed to their casting: he’s the socially awkward nerd with untreated neuroses, she’s the business savant sitting on millions but restless for more.”

Together (barely) they live in a Victorian house that has been turned into a smart home. And there’s a lab in the attic, where Henry is secretly creating an artificially intelligent robot he has named William.

“William” is an AI Frankenstein tale, you are probably thinking, and you wouldn’t be wrong. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Henry and Henry Frankenstein, what Mary Shelley’s mad scientist is called in the 1931 movie, share a name.

The alternating short and shorter chapters keep the action tearing along, rather like cuts in a movie, as the temerity to meddle with existence undoes most of the characters. Coile/Pyper toys with heavy ideas about responsibility; the mechanics of escape, and the notion of the Uncanny Valley, the phenomenon of disquiet in the face of humanlike objects that aren’t quite realistic. Is it the absence of something that creates the dissonance or is it the presence of something evil?

By the end of “William” you will know the answer. And then you’ll want to read it again. — Maren Longbella, Minnesota Star Tribune

Salvador Dali hires a young artist with a striking similarity to the goddess Proserpina to model for him in the Sacro Bosco, a mystical garden almost as surreal as Dali himself. But the beautiful Julia Lombardi quickly finds there’s more tying her to the gods of Greek and Roman myths than just her looks.

“In the Garden of Monsters” is a Gothic re- imagining of the Persephone myth set in Italy shortly after WWII and written delectably by Crystal King, who flexes her historical research and mouthwatering food writing skills. King takes full advantage of the pomegranate’s role in the story to craft amazing meals, inspired in part by Dali.

The novel is a confluence — of art and surrealism, mythology and modernity, ghosts and monsters, sex and romance, history and mystery — that’s as surprising and satisfying as the flavor combinations in the dishes described within.

As soon as Julia arrives at the castle near the Sacro Bosco — along with Dali; his wife, Gala; a young Italian man to take photographs; and a strapping American to tote around the painting supplies — otherworldly things start happening. And the whole place is somewhat disquieting, what with the unnaturally blank servants and an uncanny glow that sometimes emanates from the garden below. But their host, the exceedingly handsome Ignazio, is unmistakably familiar to Julia. His hot touch and lingering odor of smoke and cinnamon are equally comforting and unnerving.

Despite her unexplained amnesia — Julia can’t remember anything before about two years ago — it only takes a couple of days for Julia to start piecing together her predicament. It quickly becomes a cat-and-mouse game of trapping the model into eating the pomegranate seeds before she can uncover her past and the estate’s haunting secrets.

Told with super-smooth narration, “In the Garden of Monsters” is sexy, scary and scrumptious — a magical, beautiful place you don’t want to leave with an ending even more surreal than the story that preceded it. — Donna Edwards, Associated Press