NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review The Washington Post Publishers Weekly
New Hyde Hospitalβs 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. Heβs not mentally ill, but that doesnβt seem to matter. He is accused of a crime he canβt quite square with his memory. In the darkness of his room on his first night, heβs 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. Itβs 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 whoβs 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 groupβs enforcer. Battling the pill-pushing staff, one another, and their own minds, they try to kill the monster thatβs stalking them. But can the Devil die?
The Devil in Silver brilliantly brings together the compelling themes that spark all of Victor LaValleβs radiant fiction: faith, race, class, madness, and our relationship with the unseen and the uncanny. More than that, itβs a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror about friendship, love, and the courage to slay our own demons.