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The devil in silver by victor lavalle6/30/2023 ![]() ![]() The Devil rips off Pepper’s restraints and stomps on him, cracking his ribs. He has an old man’s frail body and a massive bison’s head with razor-sharp horns. It’s the monster other patients call the Devil. The officers orchestrate a 72-hour hold in New Hyde Hospital’s psych ward rather than take him back to the precinct (with the NYPD’s no-overtime policy, it’s faster that way).įour weeks in, having earned an “involuntary admit” and several days in restraints for his defiant acts, Pepper wakes in the night to find a terrifying creature breathing in his ear. Pepper, a 6-foot-3, 270-pound Queens moving man with bad impulse control, gets into a brawl with three undercover cops. ![]() LaValle opens with a whopper of a premise. grinds up the delusions of men and women.” It features a bus station porter in Utica, N.Y., who is summoned to Vermont to join the mission of a ragtag group who have heard ‘‘The Voice.” ![]() This should be no surprise for readers of LaValle’s earlier work - his streetwise collection “Slapboxing with Jesus,” his first novel, “The Ecstatic,” about a 315 pound schizophrenic who refers to himself as “a girthy goon suffering bouts of dementia,” and his second, “Big Machine,” whose title is best explained by LaValle’s line, “Doubt is the big machine. ![]() He 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 in a noirish way. Victor LaValle’s third novel is a rambunctious mash-up of horror fiction and social satire. ![]()
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