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The Devil in Silver
VICTOR LAVALLE

The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle
131 reviews (2012) (432p)
Publisher's Weekly Best Books of 2012: Top 10 #5
New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2012

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Book Description
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.

Advance praise for The Devil in Silver
 
“Literary horror just found a new master. Profound, and profoundly terrifying, Victor LaValle’s The Devil in Silver is a page-turning delight.”—Gary Shteyngart
 
The Devil in Silver is the rare work that takes seemingly disparate parts and brings them together seamlessly into something entirely original. There is madness here, and it is infused with brilliance, and the result is a story that is as illuminating as it is entertaining.”—Mat Johnson, author of Pym


Other Award Winning Books by Victor LaValle
The Changeling by Victor LaValle
216 reviews (2017) (448p) (Time Top10) (LATimes) (TIME)
Read Reviews | Visit this book's Amazon.com page
The Ecstatic by Victor LaValle
22 reviews (2002) (288p) (PF)
Read Reviews | Visit this book's Amazon.com page

Victor LaValle Award Stats
Major Prize* Nominations 1  
Unique Books Nominated for a Major Prize* 1  
Pulitzer Prize Wins 0  
Pulitzer Prize Nominations 0  
National Book Critics Circle Award Wins 0  
National Book Critics Circle Award Nominations 0  
National Book Award Wins 0  
National Book Award Nominations 0  
Man Booker Prize Wins 0  
Man Booker Prize Nominations 0  
PEN/Faulkner Award Wins 0  
PEN/Faulkner Award Nominations 1 The Ecstatic ·  

*Major Prize = Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, National Book Award, Man Booker Prize, and PEN/Faulkner Award

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