<b><b>NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY</b><br> <b><i>The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • Publishers Weekly</i></b><br><br>New Hyde Hospital’s psychiatric ward has a new resident. It also has a very, <i>very</i> old one.</b><br> <br> 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?<br> <br> <i>The Devil in Silver</i> 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.<br><br><b>Praise for <i>The Devil in Silver</i></b><br> <br> “A <b>fearless</b> exploration of America’s heart of darkness . . . a dizzying high-wire act.”—<i>The Washington Post</i><br> <i> </i><br> “LaValle never writes the same book and his recent is <b>a stunner</b>. . . . Fantastical, hellish and <b>hilarious</b>.”—Porochista Khakpour,<i> Los Angeles Times</i><br> <br> “It’s simply too <b>bighearted</b>, too gentle, too <b>kind</b>, too <b>culturally observant</b> and too idiosyncratic to squash into the small cupboard of any one genre, or even two.”—<i>The New York Times Book Review</i><br> <br> “<i>The Devil in Silver</i> . . . embeds a <b>sophisticated</b> critique of contemporary America’s inhumane treatment of madness in a fast-paced story that is by turns horrifying, suspenseful, and comic.”—<i>The Boston Globe</i><br> <br> “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 <b>striking</b> and <b>original</b> American novelist.”—<i>The New Republic</i><br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>