The Spoils

“THE SPOILS is a glorious meditation on failure, missed opportunities, and making your own wins. It’s about art and beauty and athleticism and other people’s wives...Colin Thompson has written an unapologetic and unforgettable narrator: he’s lovable and wrongheaded, frenetic and full of restless exuberance. He’s scathingly funny and outrageously inappropriate, a guy with a good heart who can’t catch a break.”

- Kimberly King Parsons (author of Blacklight & We Were The Universe)

Venice, California. 2014. Ryan Wilson, a once hopeful aspiring screenwriter is transitioning to hopelessness. The clock, the bank, the zodiac—they all point toward the exit door of this creative dream. Hapless and broke at 31-years-old, he finds himself one more sandbag for the hourglass, taking a job coaching middle school lacrosse in the affluent neighborhood of Brentwood. In a town and entertainment industry built on connections, a pool of wealthy parents is a great place to look for a guy with everything to gain.

And as luck would have it, a connection reveals itself: Camilla Emerson Tourney, the wife of his Hollywood Hero, writer/director heavyweight Buck Tourney. Trapped in a crisis of her own—hers of apathy and routine—the attraction is immediate but fraught: is he just some sort of slum crush? A dive-bar holiday for a bored Hollywood Aristocrat? And what about him? Is she only magnetic because of who her husband is? If they met in Denver would he feel the same?

At times and at turns warped with polemic introspection, The Spoils is a ride through the looking glass of the young American Man. Neurotic, hedonistic, sensitive and tawdry, Ryan Wilson takes us along as he sailor dives into the murky waters of adulthood: the battlefield of infidelity and integrity, drive and success, love, status, and the ruthlessness of trying to make it in Hollywood.

© 2025 Onion River Press (Audiobook): 9798347701445

Release date

Audiobook: February 25, 2025