The Spoil

A mesmerising novel about the perplexities of memory, Las Vegas real estate, DIY projects, and demons.

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 lives in their house, and they develop elaborate strategies to avoid 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 neighbours, a handyman named TK, further destabilizing Mandy’s fractured powers of concentration. 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.