Thank you to my editors, Eric Chinski and Julia Ringo, and my agent, Claudia Ballard, for their time and dedication to this book.

A debt of inspiration is owed to David E. Stannard and his book American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World.

For their support and encouragement, my thanks to Zeynep Kayhan, Yvonne Woon, Medaya Ocher, Andrew Eisenman, Ezra Koenig, Marya Spence, Meghan Sutherland, Willing Davidson, Ahna O’Reilly, and Eugene Kotlyarenko.

Thanks to the Ucross Foundation of Ucross, Wyoming, the Ragdale Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center.

Last, thanks to Evan Small and Lev Wilder Small for their patience.

Praise for The Scapegoat

Praise for THE SCAPEGOAT

“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 … The Scapegoat manages to interleave tokens of wry wisdom—about American culture, academic and social life, marriage, dailiness.”

—Joan Frank, The Washington Post

“To call the final act of The Scapegoat unpredictable would be a massive understatement; Davis wraps things up on her own terms, expectations be damned. That’s part of what makes The Scapegoat such a thrilling, audacious book … A remarkable debut from an author whose imagination seems unlimited.”

—Michael Schaub, Alta

“An eerie, captivating narrative that twists like a dream and will haunt like a nightmare … This dreamlike version of a murder mystery deserves the comparisons to David Lynch … If you’re looking to get swept away in an eerie, dreamy mystery, The Scapegoat is for you.”

—Debbie Clark, The Post and Courier

“A wild, beguiling tale … Like Pynchon, Davis is unafraid to be playful, skewering postmodern conventions even as she celebrates them.”

—David James Poissant, New York Journal of Books

“Unnervingly good … An eerie and surprising reconstruction by an unreliable narrator.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“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

“Sara Davis’s The Scapegoat is ingenious, suspenseful, wise, sad, sometimes very frightening, and often very funny, too. The novel gets at the terrifyingly convincing lies (or stories) we tell ourselves, inevitably about that which we most need to know. The Scapegoat made me fall in love again with the form of the novel!”

—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“The Scapegoat is a brilliant, mysterious book that challenges every tired idea of what a novel should be. Fast, funny, and deeply disturbing, it reads as though it’s been beamed in from some alternate universe, one where the rules of time and space operate just differently enough to create an entirely new kind of storytelling. Sara Davis is some kind of sorcerer. I’ll be haunted by this book for a long time to come.”

—Andrew Martin, author of Cool for America