Victor LaValle On Mental Illness, Monsters, Survival

In Victor LaValle’s new novel, The Devil in Silver, a man is mistakenly committed to a mental hospital where a buffalo-headed monster stalks patients at night.

The plausibility of a monster roaming the hospital’s halls made sense, says LaValle, who has a personal connection to the mentally ill.

“The times that I’ve been in those hospitals — even as someone who was not even institutionalized at the time — I felt so much like I was in a haunted house,” LaValle tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “And if I had looked down that hallway, for a week, for a month, for a year, at some point, it would not have been that impossible to believe that I would see something rounding that corner, something strange, something impossible, because my mind could no longer register the reality I was living in. And [it] started creating a horror that in some way symbolized the experience I was going through.”