Keynote
A mesmerizing novel about the perplexities of memory, Las Vegas real estate, DIY projects, and demons
Book Title
The Spoil
Subtitle
A Novel
Cover Image
“Psychological horror like you’ve never encountered it. A shimmering, holographic, cerebral desert thriller of extremity, equal parts heartrending and terrifying. The Spoil is a masterful inquiry of possession(s), in every sense of the term.”—Alissa Nutting
Body
In a rambling split-level house on the outskirts of Tacoma in the 1970s, a young girl is preoccupied by the anomalous phenomena she reads about in magazines: alien visitations, ESP, pyramid power, the Bermuda Triangle. Meanwhile, she and her stepbrother, thrown uneasily together by disaster and divorce, grow increasingly convinced that a malevolent presence resides in their house, and they develop elaborate strategies to live with it.
Years later, Mandy is living in Las Vegas in a modern townhouse caring for her mother who is in a terminal decline from Alzheimer’s. She works for a real estate company but struggles to focus on her tasks. She takes medication to manage her ADHD, which has her zagging between distraction and obsession, always halfway through some home renovation project. Then, while digging through a box of her mother’s things hoarded in her garage, she sets something loose. Something old and baleful: a demon that soon possesses one of her neighbors, an affable semiretired house flipper and handyman named TK. What follows is a gripping and often terrifying story of familial grief in which the past is both elusive and paralyzing, and questions of science and spirit become urgent.
The Spoil, Maile Chapman’s first novel in fifteen years, is tuned in to the most unusual frequencies, bringing us messages from beyond about the deepest mysteries of grief and longing.
Years later, Mandy is living in Las Vegas in a modern townhouse caring for her mother who is in a terminal decline from Alzheimer’s. She works for a real estate company but struggles to focus on her tasks. She takes medication to manage her ADHD, which has her zagging between distraction and obsession, always halfway through some home renovation project. Then, while digging through a box of her mother’s things hoarded in her garage, she sets something loose. Something old and baleful: a demon that soon possesses one of her neighbors, an affable semiretired house flipper and handyman named TK. What follows is a gripping and often terrifying story of familial grief in which the past is both elusive and paralyzing, and questions of science and spirit become urgent.
The Spoil, Maile Chapman’s first novel in fifteen years, is tuned in to the most unusual frequencies, bringing us messages from beyond about the deepest mysteries of grief and longing.
List Price
$20.00
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About the Author
Credit: Aaron Mayes
Praise
“The Spoil is about caretaking in its myriad forms, about beauty and danger, one that dares to make a record of ordinary life so relentless that in the end every humble crack of concrete and accumulation of dirt hums its own true profundity. This is a frighteningly loving tale of persistence that is at once cosmic and minute.”—Lucy Corin, author of The Swank Hotel
“What a wondrous and strange book! The Spoil centers on a complicated mother-daughter relationship and its possible supernatural underpinnings. It’s a page-turner that's fueled by horror, confusion, and love.”—Darcey Steinke
