Maile Chapman’s novel The Spoil opens with a jolt of the uncanny and keeps moving across several decades, tracing Mandy from childhood in Tacoma to a settled adult life in Las Vegas. The book starts with a scene that feels both ordinary and wrong: “I was reading by the woodstove when I heard my grandmother lift the phone to answer a call almost before it rang.”
That first shock becomes the engine of the novel. Mandy grows up believing something strange is always close at hand, and that suspicion hardens into a lifelong interest in the occult after she senses that something is afoot in her home. As she gets older, she moves to Las Vegas for graduate school and stays there, later becoming her mother’s caregiver after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease changes the family’s balance for good.
Chapman gives Mandy a life that is less about one revelation than about accumulation. Jeff, her stepbrother, drifts in and out with an erratic presence that never fully settles into comfort or estrangement. Mandy’s own thinking becomes stranger with time, and she comes to believe that some hauntings do not need a conscious force behind them. “I was starting to think by then that residual hauntings might happen all by themselves if conditions were right, with no more intelligence left behind than in a photograph or a videotape,” she says.
That idea gives the novel its reach. The story is not only about ghosts in the literal sense, but about the way family history, memory and illness can make a home feel charged with leftover meaning. Later, Mandy develops the sense that something uncanny is occupying a vast distance from her house, an unease that broadens the book beyond private grief and into something more diffuse and unsettling. When a neighbor named TK begins acting erratically, a geologist named Sam arrives to help and ends up staying in Mandy’s guest room, pulling the novel closer to outright disturbance.
Then Chapman tilts the story again. Sam’s blunt diagnosis — “there’s a spore lodged inside your friend’s skull” — pushes the novel into territory that is at once biological, supernatural and impossible to neatly separate. That mix is what makes The Spoil work: it refuses to decide whether Mandy is confronting a haunting, a disease or some third thing that language cannot fully hold.
The novel has already been described as maximalist in some places and hauntingly ambiguous in others, and that feels right for a book that keeps widening its frame without ever losing Mandy. It also invites comparison to Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy and Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape, works that understand how strangeness can gather force when the explanation stays just out of reach. For readers drawn to stories where domestic life and the occult keep colliding, Chapman’s book answers its own mystery plainly: the haunting is real because Mandy lives with it, and the damage it leaves behind is what the novel is really about.
