Still, any way you slice it, Pepper’s not crazy. A lot depends on how you look at a thing. Maybe he got caught gallantly roughing up his sorta girlfriend’s controlling ex-husband … or maybe the big man got cuffed after thumping the ex of some divorcee who occasionally bends his ear down in the basement laundry. Sure, Pepper maybe drinks too much, maybe has trouble controlling his temper.
Situating that collapse, LaValle finds his ideal venue in the genre trappings of the “haunted insane asylum,” and The Devil In Silver begins when the door shuts: On the brink of shift change, three cops decide to shirk their own paperwork and drop combative everyoaf Pepper at the New Hyde Mental Hospital. Creation stories.įollowing that restorative model, Victor LaValle’s sensational third novel, The Devil In Silver, revisits his personal holy trinity-mental illness, horror and community-while capping a trio of novels ( The Ecstatic in 2003 and Big Machine in 2009) that, in sequence, compose an epic ode to getting one’s shit together.įirst, things fall apart. Stories that move from needing help to accepting help to giving help in return.
At this exact moment, people are leaning forward in cheap folding chairs, clutching books in their laps and telling each other simple stories: what they used to be like, what happened, and what they are like now. The first is to ponder the grand purpose until all the fun is sucked away, the second is to enjoy it.” “There are really only two ways to react to the extraordinary.
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