Victor Lavalle

Landing in a mental institution after being accused of a crime he does not remember, self-proclaimed hero Pepper is assaulted by a monster that has been attacking patients but that the hospital staff does not believe exists.

A Novel

The Devil in Silver

Victor LaValle

Landing in a budget-strapped mental institution after being accused of a crime he does not remember, self-proclaimed hero Pepper is assaulted by a monstrous creature that has been attacking patients but that the hospital staff does not believe exists, a situation that compels Pepper to rally three fellow inmates in a fight for survival. 15,000 first printing.

Montgomery Pierce

I honestly don't have words at the moment but this book was phenomenal.

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

Janice Hopper

This wasn't quite the book I thought it was going to be. I kinda thought it was horror. I mean, the description has the Devil dropping from the ceiling in a psychiatric hospital and harassing patients. 

It's that (more or less), but that's not all it is. 

Pepper, the man who's been admitted for a "72 hour hold" for getting feisty with a couple of plain clothes policemen, tries to figure out what's going on. He's stuck in the psychiatric ward indefinitely in spite of supposedly being there for a limited amount of time. Nobody cares about the inmates. Nobody does anything serious to try to help them. In fact, they're just assets for drawing money from agencies. That doesn't stop even after they're dead. Added to the bleak situation, there's the mystery of the Devil dropping out of the ceiling. The staff knows about him, but they just try to keep him away from the rest of the patients.

At one point, Pepper briefly has a fling with another patient, Sue (or Xiu, since she's Chinese, but Pepper can't pronounce her name properly.) She tells him: "Hard times make people scared. And scared people see monsters everywhere.” 

This book is about hard times. 

It's also discursive and rambles around a bit. It's not entirely bleak all the way through. 

I'm upfront about my near total inability to see symbolism in writing, but I suspect there's a lot of it here. We're all trapped to one degree or another in a situation we didn't choose and can't escape from. And sometimes there are monsters. Nevertheless, we go on.

Alisha 

This book was slow in spots and the transitions between characters and their stories wasn't very smooth. The book ended up feeling like several different books rather than one. But it was good enough that I plan to check out the authors other work.

Jordan Robinson

5🌟
It's the society that's untethered yet we're institutionalized.

Katrina White

Basy Nightshade

more of a 3.5 ish than 4 stars.
really enjoyed it. the atmosphere of the book was beatuful, creepy, and crazy. i love stories that takes place in asylum but they're always a hit or miss for me. this one was a hit. the charachters were the best thing about this book tbh, I LOVED the character build!.
my two problems were : 
it has some parts that wasn't necessary at all. like too much details into things that i felt like it's just there to fill pages for no reason ( like why too much about the rat tho! )
the wrap up of the main plot was all over the place. it needed a more defenit explanation!.
but overall, i enjoyed it.

The Devil in Silver A Novel

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