The Devil in Silver

July 2, 2012
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.

July 15, 2012
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.

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November 1, 2011

That old man with a bison's head, roaming the mental ward each night at New Hyde Hospital? It's the devil. To defeat him, newcomer Skinny Ray joins forces with three other patients. LaValle's last novel, Big Machine, won the Shirley Jackson, Earnest Gaines, and American Book awards and got best book nods from at least a half-dozen venues. I expect a lot from this book, and I don't even read horror.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2012
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)