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A Novel
by Maile Chapman
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.
"Chapman confronts mysteries both mundane and supernatural in her explorations of grief, loss, neurotypicality, and the value of connection in a scary world. Grief, life, and mysterious phenomena, all in one absorbing account—to be read with the lights on." —Kirkus Reviews
"There's plenty to admire, but not all of it hangs together." —Publishers Weekly
"By tuning in to the most fragile things of this world―whether people or objects or phenomena―Maile Chapman is able to see through to the unstoppable force of life. The Spoil traverses the always-permeable membranes between our homes and our histories, between neighbors and creatures and intimates, between the known and the unknown. It is a book 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
"Psychological horror like you've never encountered it. A shimmering, holographic, cerebral desert thriller of extremity, equal parts heart-rending and terrifying. The Spoil is a masterful inquiry of possession(s), in every sense of the term." ―Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love
This information about The Spoil was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Maile Chapman's stories have appeared in A Public Space, the Literary Review, The Mississippi Review, and Post Road. She earned her MFA from Syracuse University and is currently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.
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