The Scapegoat
A Novel
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
"The Scapegoat is a novel of disquiet and disturbance, with an atmosphere of perfect dread. Think Patricia Highsmith or Jim Thompson, that blend of menace and brilliance. Sara Davis had me shivering. This is the debut novel of a marvelous new talent." —Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling
N is employed at a prestigious California university, where he has distinguished himself as an aloof and somewhat eccentric presence. His meticulous, ordered life is violently disrupted by the death of his estranged father—unanticipated and, as it increasingly seems to N, surrounded by murky circumstances. His investigation leads him to a hotel built over a former Spanish mission, a site with a dark power and secrets all its own. On campus, a chance meeting with a young doctor provokes uncomfortable feelings on the direction of his life, and N begins to have vivid, almost hallucinatory daydreams about the year he spent in Ottawa, and a shameful episode from his past.
Meanwhile, a shadowy group of fringe academics surfaces in relation to his father’s death. Their preoccupation with a grim chapter in California’s history runs like a surreal parallel to the staid world of academic life, where N’s relations with his colleagues grow more and more hostile. As he comes closer to the heart of the mystery, his ability to distinguish between delusion and reality begins to erode, and he is forced to confront disturbing truths about himself: his irrational antagonism toward a young female graduate student, certain libidinal impulses, and a capacity for violence. Is he the author of his own investigation? Or is he the unwitting puppet of a larger conspiracy?
With this inventive, devilish debut, saturated with unexpected wit and romanticism, Sara Davis probes the borders between reality and delusion, intimacy and solitude, revenge and justice. The Scapegoat exposes the surreal lingering behind the mundane, the forgotten history underfoot, and the insanity just around the corner.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Davis, a PW reviewer, debuts with a delightfully off-kilter account of a man's hallucinatory search for clues about his father's death. "The path between events that may seem unrelated will soon become clear," reads the unnamed and unreliable narrator's horoscope at the start of the book, a promise that Davis gleefully breaks. The narrator, a middle-aged, misanthropic loner, tours the house his father used to live in, and wonders what happened (no details are provided at the outset). Various figures supply him with cryptic clues about his father's fate and entanglements, such as a conversation with a professor about a graduate student who knew his father, the meaning of which hovers just out of the narrator's grasp. Central to the mystery is the Old Mission San Buenaventura hotel his father had visited for unknown reasons, where he finds a bloody suitcase. Historical details of colonial genocide add another level of ominousness ("Stop sites of genocide from becoming tourist attractions" reads a flier addressed to the narrator's father, who was involved in its opening) but their connection to the mystery feels tenuous. In the end it's beside the point, as Davis offers plenty of surprises from her narrator. With the eeriness of a David Lynch film, this is made gripping by the narrator's self-made traps.