Hardcover, 412 pages
English language
Published Aug. 21, 2012 by Spiegel & Grau.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • Publishers Weekly
New Hyde Hospital’s psychiatric ward has a new resident. It also has a very, very old one.
Pepper is a rambunctious big man, minor-league troublemaker, working-class hero (in his own mind), and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He’s not mentally ill, but that doesn’t seem to matter. He is accused of a crime he can’t quite square with his memory. In the darkness of his room on his first night, he’s visited by a terrifying creature with the body of an old man and the head of a bison who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It’s no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes …
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • Publishers Weekly
New Hyde Hospital’s psychiatric ward has a new resident. It also has a very, very old one.
Pepper is a rambunctious big man, minor-league troublemaker, working-class hero (in his own mind), and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He’s not mentally ill, but that doesn’t seem to matter. He is accused of a crime he can’t quite square with his memory. In the darkness of his room on his first night, he’s visited by a terrifying creature with the body of an old man and the head of a bison who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It’s no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates in a plot to fight back: Dorry, an octogenarian schizophrenic who’s been on the ward for decades and knows all its secrets; Coffee, an African immigrant with severe OCD, who tries desperately to send alarms to the outside world; and Loochie, a bipolar teenage girl who acts as the group’s enforcer. Battling the pill-pushing staff, one another, and their own minds, they try to kill the monster that’s stalking them. But can the Devil die?
The Devil in Silver brilliantly brings together the compelling themes that spark all of Victor LaValle’s radiant fiction: faith, race, class, madness, and our relationship with the unseen and the uncanny. More than that, it’s a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror about friendship, love, and the courage to slay our own demons.
Praise for The Devil in Silver
“A fearless exploration of America’s heart of darkness . . . a dizzying high-wire act.”—The Washington Post
“LaValle never writes the same book and his recent is a stunner. . . . Fantastical, hellish and hilarious.”—Los Angeles Times
“It’s simply too bighearted, too gentle, too kind, too culturally observant and too idiosyncratic to squash into the small cupboard of any one genre, or even two.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Embeds a sophisticated critique of contemporary America’s inhumane treatment of madness in a fast-paced story that is by turns horrifying, suspenseful, and comic.”—The Boston Globe
“LaValle uses the thrills of horror to draw attention to timely matters. And he does so without sucking the joy out of the genre. . . . A striking and original American novelist.”—The New Republic
This is an asylum story for today, a parable of systemic misery, defeat and victory in the face of unsteerable momentum.
LaValle is definitely becoming a favorite author. He’s got a distinctive narrative voice that appeals to me. He manages to use humor in ways that work for me. He writes weird stories that tackle big themes. I’m a fan!
I understand why his books are generally rated lower, though. They meander, and the horror/weirdness they promise is often secondary to personal stories. I think it must be hard to find the right audience for his books, but I’m it.
This one is more of a critique of psychiatric wards in the US than anything else. The treatment of patients, the financials, the abuse by police, etc. You follow a new patient, Pepper, as he gets acquainted with all these problems.
There’s a lot of compassion here for the patients, these forgotten people. They aren’t all lovely people, but they are people.
I liked the conclusion a lot and where things …
LaValle is definitely becoming a favorite author. He’s got a distinctive narrative voice that appeals to me. He manages to use humor in ways that work for me. He writes weird stories that tackle big themes. I’m a fan!
I understand why his books are generally rated lower, though. They meander, and the horror/weirdness they promise is often secondary to personal stories. I think it must be hard to find the right audience for his books, but I’m it.
This one is more of a critique of psychiatric wards in the US than anything else. The treatment of patients, the financials, the abuse by police, etc. You follow a new patient, Pepper, as he gets acquainted with all these problems.
There’s a lot of compassion here for the patients, these forgotten people. They aren’t all lovely people, but they are people.
I liked the conclusion a lot and where things landed with the Devil. I think it’s kind of predictable, but it works, it feels sincere.
Favorite quotes:
It wasn’t about whether or not he took his pills, and it wasn’t about whether or not some kids had a little weed in their pockets. This wasn’t about an infraction, but dictating a philosophy of life: certain types of people must be overseen. Pepper hadn’t considered this a problem before, he realized, because he hadn’t been one of those types.
“Men always want to die for something. For someone. I can see the appeal. You do it once and it’s done. No more worrying, not knowing, about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I know you all think it sounds brave, but I’ll tell you something even braver. To struggle and fight for the ones you love today. And then do it all over again the next day. Every day. For your whole life. It’s not as romantic, I admit. But it takes a lot of courage to live for someone, too.”
Everything by Victor LaValle approaches perfection in my opinion. This book is about monsters, mental illness, and public institutions and its completely compelling.
More psychodrama than the horror that is promised by the publisher, "The Devil in Silver" can keep the readers turning the pages but may leave them unsatisfied upon completion.
