You Should Be Reading Victor LaValle

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 105
Victor LaValle, The Devil in Silver and The Ballad of Black Tom

A monster roams the psychiatric unit of New York’s New Hyde Hospital, terrorizing the patients least prepared to defend themselves. A guy known only as Pepper has been committed to New Hyde without a trial. At first, Pepper wants only to escape the hospital’s narrow confines. But when the violent bison-headed monster comes within inches of killing him, Pepper adopts a new mission: find and destroy the monster.

Victor LaValle isn’t the first novelist to use genre fiction conventions to create more self-conscious literature. Indeed, as his text name-drops writers like Stephen King and Ken Kesey, it’s difficult to read him without thinking about Jorge Luis Borges or Salman Rushdie. Reading LaValle, I felt like I’d fallen for a bait-and-switch, but in a good way: his back cover copy implies a downmarket paperback thriller. His text is sophisticated, character-driven, and literary.

In The Devil In Silver, Pepper enters the hospital, thinking himself a sane man committed unjustly. He never completely shakes that belief. But his narrow-minded obsession with escape, which he increasingly realizes means passing through the Devil’s domain, starts hurting other people. He soon has the ward in open revolt. Somehow, even when people keep dying, Pepper finds ways to rationalize that it isn’t his fault.

Because the Devil exists, trapped in a no-access hallway behind a locked silver door. The staff know it’s there, the patients know, even the police see the Devil rampaging through New Hyde’s hallways and remain willfully blind. Pepper knows he can’t leave without first facing it. Yet every challenge to the hierarchy which protects the Devil, results in Pepper getting hit with high-dose pharmaceuticals. They’d rather dose the rebellion away.

Surprisingly, the Devil itself, and the story’s supernatural elements, remain off-table throughout most of this novel. It isn’t about the monster, primarily; LaValle spends his greatest length on the ways his characters come to grips with themselves, or more often, the ways they don’t. Pepper thinks he’s Randle McMurphy, leading an insurgency against an unjust administration. Only slowly does he realize his fellow patients seriously need their treatment.

The twist, though, is: the administration really is unjust. Simply because the patients tenuously depend on their medications, doesn’t mean a tyrannical administration and a moribund staff culture aren’t keeping them down. Pepper desperately tries to mediate the three-way battle between the bureaucracy, the patients, and the Devil. Somehow, he never completely realizes he’s possibly part of the problem.

The Ballad of Black Tom is more unambiguously dark fantasy, a direct rewrite of H.P. Lovecraft’s notorious short story, “The Horror at Red Hook.” But even when explicitly rebuilding a genre classic, LaValle keeps emphasis on characters and literary weight. Charles Thomas Tester, a Jazz Age son of Harlem, makes bank delivering cursed items for supernatural customers. He’s moved so many artifacts, their wizardry has rubbed off on him.

Victor LaValle

As a sideline, “Tommy” Tester is a mediocre guitarist. Brooklyn eccentric Robert Suydam hires Tommy as entertainment for a darkly themed banquet. Suydam really wants Tommy’s paranormal aura; apparently Suydam, a student of ancient arcana, intends his dinner guests as mass sacrifice to revive a sleeping God. Personal tragedy, though, renders Tommy less than docile, and at a key moment, he interrupts the spell.

LaValle clearly intends this novella to comment upon its source, the story that probably most directly voices Lovecraft’s racism. Lovecraft lived briefly in Red Hook, Brooklyn, but couldn’t stand mingling with its racially diverse population. He called it “a maze of hybrid squalor,” a term LaValle recycles twice. Lovecraft’s story, though genuinely terror-inducing, is also supremely bigoted, so LaValle interjects a character poised to resist.

Lovecraft centered the story on Thomas Malone, an Irish-American detective. LaValle splits that character in two. Detective Malone, in LaValle’s telling, becomes a rather obvious cypher for Lovecraft himself, a sensitive but bigoted seeker after truth. Tommy Tester inherits Lovecraft’s more muscular tendencies, but also a tragic history perfectly suited for today’s BLM culture. These two stand poised for a cataclysmic confrontation, and LaValle doesn’t disappoint.

These stories share themes of exclusion, bureaucracy, and willful blindness. But they aren’t retreads of the same story. The Devil In Silver is long, with an ensemble cast and multiple subplots; The Ballad of Black Tom is a concise novella with a singular, uncluttered through-line (but two POV characters). LaValle, like most authors, has themes he treasures, but he doesn’t simply repeat himself. His characters’ darkness isn’t just a gimmick.

Truth, for LaValle, is found only by passing through the dark.