Review by New York Times Review
VICTOR LAVALLE'S publishers have made the curious decision to market his third novel, "The Devil in Silver," as a horror thriller. But it doesn't really fit either part of that label; it isn't much interested in making your pulse race, and it won't scare the pants off anyone. 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. LaValle leads his readers to the New Hyde mental hospital, a shabby urban Bedlam in Queens, shoves them in and locks the door behind them for 400 pages. For company we have Pepper - a big, lonely loser with all the impulse control of your average preschooler - and the other inmates, a drugged-out collection of the unwell, unloved and unwanted: poor people with emotional problems that no one wants to think about, let alone treat. There's also a geriatric Minotaur locked behind a silver door, a beast the patients believe might be Old Harry himself. But when it comes to creating suffering, the Devil can't begin to compete with a nonfunctioning mental health care system, too underfunded and unaccountable to do anyone any good. LaValle explores the way New Hyde's patients are routinely doped up, locked down and abused (by one another and the staff), all while refusing to demonize any one cog in a machine that grinds up anyone unlucky enough to be fed into it. Doing well by these people isn't in the larger social interest. In times of austerity, the last thing anyone wants to do is throw a bunch of money at an agency that can't offer a return on the taxpayer's investment. Or, as Pepper's doctor puts it: "A wise man once said that every system is designed to give you the results you actually get. . . . This system is working." "For some people," Pepper retorts. "Wrong," the doctor tells him. "The system is working exactly right for those it was intended for. That's why it hasn't been fixed. Because it isn't broken!" Like police departments, schools and a variety of other government services, New Hyde has the misfortune - an unforgivable one, in today's society - of not being designed to produce a profit. Call it the original American sin. Indeed, LaValle's fellowship of the mistreated and the mentally ill is only a stand-in for a much larger slice of inconvenient America. "Maybe this is the world," one old tenant of New Hyde bluntly says. "If you think about it, what's so different? Wake up in the morning, eat some breakfast, take a few pills to start the day. Go to a conference room and waste time. Go to lunch, take a few more pills. . . . Eat dinner while you watch TV. Take a few more pills and go to bed. Isn't that how most people are living? It's been a while since I was outside, but that's what the news is always saying. Maybe out there is a lot like in here." So what about the monster behind the silver door? For Pepper and his makeshift family of the mad, getting even with the demon comes to seem more important than their own recovery or their possible return to the world beyond New Hyde. It is, LaValle suggests, easier to live an unhappy life when you have a handy demon upon which to focus your despair and rage; easier than trying to wrestle with the conditions that led to that unhappy life in the first place. In this regard, everyone loves the Devil. Joe Hill is the author of the story collection "20th Century Ghosts" and the novels "Horns" and "Heart-Shaped Box."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 7, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Bound to be compared to Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Lavalle's fourth novel takes place at New Hyde Mental Hospital, where a pugnacious man called Pepper is forcibly committed. Once inside, Pepper, like McMurphy in Kesey's story, stirs up trouble by pushing back against the neglectful and often abusive nurse in charge and her staff, for which he's punished. One of the patients explains that New Hyde is for the Chronics the incurable and the involuntary, and Pepper's temper rises with the injustice of his situation, for which he's punished. Then Pepper hears about and is attacked by a monster, a cruel beast with unnatural strength that has killed several patients. The remarkably sane inmates, led by Pepper, outwit the staff and hunt the Devil down in a grand finale of mythic proportion. More than a scary horror novel, this multileveled story challenges readers to consider the nature of madness, basic human rights, and the beast within us all.--Baker, Jen Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Reviewed by Benjamin Percy. New Hyde hospital-a cash-strapped mental institution in Queens-is the setting of Victor LaValle's excellent third novel. Think One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest meets Dante's Inferno. LaValle anticipates the inevitable comparison to Kesey and tips his hat early on, when a patient says that though Kesey's novel takes place in a mental hospital, "it isn't about mentally ill people." In the same manner, LaValle makes it unclear who is crazy and who isn't; the overlapping realities of the doctors, nurses, and patients really aren't so different. The omniscient narrator chases many perspectives through the fluorescent-lit corridors of New Hyde-even a rat's-but the central character is Pepper, a big-shouldered, working-class troublemaker who ends up institutionalized simply because it means less paperwork for the police. Pepper is led to believe he will face a judge after 72 hours, but bad luck and bad decisions keep him at New Hyde-always medicated, sometimes restrained to his bed so long the small of his back "stopped feeling like a curled fist a day ago and now was just a pocket of cold fire burning through his waist." And you never want to end up restrained at New Hyde. Because the Devil is on the prowl. He is housed-or so the patients believe-behind a silver door at the end of an empty hallway. At night he visits his neighbors. His heels clop "like horseshoes on cobblestones." He has the body of a frail old man, but the head of a bison, with a "deep, wet pit" of a mouth and "dead white eyes." Pepper's roommate-a malt ball-headed man named Coffee who spends most of his time trying to phone the president-believes, "The food makes us fat. The drugs make us slow. We're cattle. Food. For it." The novel is genuinely unsettling-as the devil lowers himself from the ceiling, as the doctors and nurses abuse the patients, as a woman commits suicide by swallowing a bed sheet so deeply that its tip is stained yellow with bile-but it is also very funny. LaValle has a wicked sense of humor, and the gags often come as a relief, such as when an institutionalized teenage girl in baby-blue Nikes takes down a big man with her "crazy strength" or a monstrous rat crashes through a ceiling tile, snatches a box of Cocoa Puffs, and scampers through a gauntlet of nurses stomping their feet and swinging brooms. In a novel suffused with the tragic and sinister, humor is necessary, modulating emotion, keeping us off guard. But on occasion, LaValle gets too silly and cute. The hospital administration, always cutting corners, repurposes the building "like a motherfucker." And as Pepper sneaks his lover into his room, the narrator says, "ladies and gentlemen, despite the perceived differences between them and you, the mentally ill like jooking, too!" Moments like these make the tone feel unstable, and the moments of genuine terror harder to take seriously.But these are small gripes. The novel, expertly written, will leave you wondering about its many memorable characters and lingering over questions about fear, horror, madness, suffering, friendship, and love. Benjamin Percy is the author of the novels Red Moon (forthcoming from Grand Central) and The Wilding, as well as two books of short stories. His honors include the Whiting Writers' Award, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest meets Stephen King's It in this page-turner by LaValle (Big Machine). When his latest brawl involves undercover police, big Pepper is committed for a 72-hour evaluation at a Queens mental health facility called Northwest. But the combination of Pepper's bad temper, Northwest's corrupt, overworked staffers, surprises unleashed by the other residents, and overwhelming meds soon has that stay looking permanent. Pepper is drawn into a plot with an unlikely team of the facility's oldest resident, a deceptively tough African American girl, and a man who obsessively works the pay phone bank to stop the havoc wreaked by a secreted resident of an off-limits wing, a killer whom some say is the Devil. Verdict LaValle skillfully mixes an indictment of the mental health system, eccentric and diverse character studies, and horror thrills in a freewheeling novel that is only occasionally marred by twitchy shifts in point of view. This Devil is one hell of a good time: exciting, insightful, tragic, and hopeful in equal proportion.-Neil Hollands, Williamsburg Regional Lib., VA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A diffuse novel reminiscent of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest--but then, what novel set in a mental ward does not remind one of Randle McMurphy and Company? Pepper is a huge man who gets put in New Hyde Hospital in Queens for assaulting three undercover police officers he's dubbed Huey, Dewey and Louie. Although he was originally supposed to stay no more than 72 hours, Pepper winds up getting put on a potent collection of psycho-sedative drugs and "wakes up" almost a month later, wondering what he's doing there. The ward has the usual collection of oddities, misfits and eccentrics, and Pepper fairly quickly adapts to his new situation, perhaps a sign that life outside the walls is close to indistinguishable from life within. One new wrinkle in this relatively predictable scheme of things is that the devil--yes, Satan himself--seems to occasionally run loose at night, wreaking havoc on some of the inmates. Meanwhile, Pepper starts to adjust to life on the inside, attending book-group sessions, where he becomes enamored with the letters of Vincent van Gogh, and experiencing the irrational vagaries of his fellow inmates. He also begins a sexual relationship with Sue (or Xiu), who's scheduled to be deported to China in a week, so Pepper takes upon himself the task of rescuing her from this fate. Seeing himself as a savior allows Dr. Anand, the head psychiatrist, the luxury of diagnosing Pepper as having Narcissistic Personality Disorder--and you know things have gotten out of hand when a psychiatrist tells a group of inmates, "You are terrible people...Sometimes I want to kill you." A story whose idea is much more engaging than the reading experience itself.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
