Victor LaValle
Bantam (Penguin), 15 January 2026
Available as: HB, 432pp, audio, e
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780857509956
I'm grateful to the publisher for access to an advance e-copy of The Devil in Silver to consider for review.
The Devil in Silver is the story of Pepper, a man who is rubbing along just about OK until he picks a fight in a car park, and ends up being dumped in a psychiatric ward by the police officers who attend. (There's less paperwork for them that way). Thus he's introduced to the Kafkaesque world of New Hyde Hospital, dosed with powerful meds (and if he won't take them, why that means there's something wrong with you, doesn't it?) and effectively "disappeared" from everyday life with no appeal rights and no advocacy.
LaValle does an excellent job of portraying the broken system that has Pepper in its grasp. Broken, in that nobody gets the help they need. A system, in that it grinds on. Apart from him and the other patients - sketched with a degree of tenderness and insight I think - that system also has the staff firmly in their place, weighed down by reams of paperwork and a defunct computer system designed by banks to cheat their customers.
As if all that wasn't bad enough, there's a monster on the ward, and patients keep dying. Or vanishing.
Pepper realises that he has to get out of this place, but who can he trust to help him?
A magnificent, sad, and funny book that ranges here and there in its focus and gives us, for example, potted intros to Vincent Van Gogh and to the US silver rush of the 1840s as well as the thoughts of a narcissistic rat which lives in the abandoned part of the hospital, The Devil in Silver balances deliciously on the edge of naturalism and of fantasy. Is there really a monster at large in the hospital? Can we trust what Pepper - not to speak of the other patients - report about that, or anything else? Driven by a rage against the sheer unfairness of it all - take Loochie, for example, a young woman trapped ion the ward since she was 13 because she needs help and her family can't cope - LaValle creates a readable and involving story that visits some very uncomfortable place.
The book is also mindful of wider social dis-ease. While Hyde is a token system, it sits amidst a wider broken, or breaking, system. The inmates' 24 TV picks up news broadcasts pumping out disinformation and hate. There is a reference to "41 shots". With inmates like Pepper in the ward on a fall premise, the question does ask itself, should some of those... out there... not be.. in here?
It's a book that doesn't offer easy answers. Yes, some mysteries are resolved here, sort of, and Pepper achieves a victory of sorts in what he sets out to do, but the authorities are practised and containment - that's their who thing - and the most heinous scandals fade from the news feeds quickly, as here.
An unsettling and troubling read, but one with tremendous heart and deeply memorable characters.
For more information about The Devil in Silver, see the publisher's website here.
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