The Scapegoat is deeply seductive in its unshowy power

Readers won't be able to put down bizarre, arresting mystery until the very last page

The Scapegoat Sara Davis Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Is The Scapegoat, Sara Davis's debut novel, in fact a “propulsive and destabilizing literary mystery,” per its back-cover blurb? It is — and then some.

The novel's power and steady control manifest in its voice: that of an eerily inward, single male, perhaps in his 30s, who lives monkishly, working at a Stanford-like university in a fogveiled setting (California's Bay Area). This nameless narrator exudes shyness, loneliness and social ineptitude. But soon his observations begin to disturb and puzzle. When a colleague named Kirstie enters the break room after her run, the narrator is tensely vigilant.

“She was dressed ... entirely in athletic clothing ... Her cheeks were flushed, and the triangle of flesh below her collarbone was flecked with beads of perspiration ... She moved closer to me and I could smell the scent of her freshly exercised body in the small, windowless room.”

Does the narrator desire Kirstie? Is he repulsed? That “windowless room” doubles for his claustrophobic, frantic mind.

It seems the narrator's father has recently died. The “circumstances surrounding his death” bother the narrator. “Not only that, but someone was trying to tell me something about these circumstances, or so I thought,” by dropping into the narrator's mailbox a circled real estate listing for the narrator's father's house. The narrator then resolves to “investigate.”

Note “or so I thought,” an early key. One of this novel's striking achievements is to offer murky conjecture in crisp, dry, stately, unshowy prose. Those calm rhythms soothe, at first: The narrator mulls his life while making coffee and meals; he washes dishes, tucks himself into bed. “Did I already have a glass of water on the nightstand? I did.”

Posing as a potential buyer, the narrator visits the advertised house. There he raids a closet, retrieving a piece of paper from his father's coat. It bears the name of a local hotel, written — we're told — in his father's hand.

Events that seem to commence plausibly later unravel or go grainy. Our narrator agrees to have drinks with department colleagues and an unpleasant, coarse “guest lecturer” who cajoles him into giving her a lift back to — right — the above-named hotel. There he'll encounter characters and events resembling those from The Shining. Apparently the hotel's site carries a ghastly, genocidal history, which seeps, by creepy turns, into the “investigation.”

Nothing 's certain — except that this is not, strictly speaking, a ghost story.

In the drunken lecturer's hotel room, the narrator coolly repels her personal questions. Urging her to sleep, he searches her room for “clues.” Then he finds something unspeakable. And the nightmare is off and running.

The Scapegoat proves difficult to describe without spoiling. As with some of our best haunted fiction (The Turn of the Screw, The Haunting of Hill House), the story obeys an internal, quasi-demonic logic.

But its monsters finally strike us as human, as does the reckoning which must occur.