I’ve been working my way through another book from my own library (I’m serious this year about reducing that stack of books around my night table…or at least of making room for new books waiting to be moved to the “next in line” stacks). However, I placed a hold with the local library back in December for this particular book. When I received the e-mail letting me know that my turn to borrow it had finally arrived…well, who I am to refuse the call of the wild library?

So I put aside the book I was working through and switched my book-loving fealty to Victor LaValle’s The Devil in Silver.

Let’s start with the dust jacket description:

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?

Again, I don’t usually provide these descriptions in my reviews, but I wanted to in this instance, to make a point. And that point is, this is not what this book is about.

Okay, it is. But it isn’t. It’s kind of like saying that Star Trek is about space exploration. See what I’m saying? It is. But it isn’t…and, with The Devil in Silver, the “isn’t” is what makes it such a compelling and difficult read.

What LaValle has done with this book is craft an enrapturing and infuriating castigation against several publicly facilitated ways in which we manage those whom most people immediately deem unmanageable, whether it be the mentally ill, the incarcerated, the illegally present. It is chaotic and claustrophobic and intelligent and revelatory and…I couldn’t put it down and I couldn’t stand reading it at times because it will cut you with its closeness to the truth.

The horror of this story is not in its “devil” but in the humans themselves, seemingly cored of their humanity by the perfunctory pressures of mind-numbing minutiae and the stunning insensitivities of status quo that have left them totally void of compassion or caring. Just do what you’re told, pay attention only to the words on the screen or the words on the paper. Ignore the human life those words represent. Makes it that much easier to dismiss yourself from culpability when you can say you were simply following orders.

There were points while reading this novel when I thought I wouldn’t be able to keep going. I’ve already stated that I know too well the inner workings of public mental healthcare in this country. LaValle obviously knows it as well. In fact, he has stated that the idea for The Devil in Silver was planted from a personal experience. What was planted all those years ago, LaValle forced into the light through one of the most captivating novels I have read in a long time.

I’m not necessarily sure how I feel about the climax or resultant ending, but I honestly think the strength of The Devil in Silver is more in its telling than in its ending. That being said, LaValle succeeded in creating characters that were, while perhaps not completely likeable, completely believable and completely empathetic. For these reasons, I truly wanted that mythical, virtually non-existent “happy ending.” For some, I got my wish. For others…

Well, I guess you’ll just have to read this one for yourselves. Just be warned: It is not horror in the exploitative or visceral sense of the word. It is horror in the literary, intellectual sense…in the pressing, rooted-in-reality sense. It will burrow beneath your skin in the most haunting of ways.

Final Verdict: I had to return this one, of course, but I might be adding this to my library, if only to make sure that I show support for an incredibly talented author.