LaValle handles the development of the characters with mental illness well. Pepper’s cohorts include: Dorry, an old-timer with schizophrenia who’s been on the ward for decades Coffee, an African immigrant, who is struggling with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder and Loochie, a hot-headed teenager with bipolar disorder. This nightmarish event provides a rallying point for Pepper and several other patients who come together and fight back against the creature, the hospital’s staff and their own demons. The next morning other patients confirm that after dark the creature roams the hallways. But on his first night inside, Pepper is attacked by a horrifying creature that is quickly removed from his room by hospital staff. But when he finds he’s been taken to a mental hosptial, he decides to wait it out the 72 hour hold and go home. Pepper is a big, rowdy brawler guilt of petty crimes, but does not have a mental illness. As only someone who has been there could, novelist Victor LaValle author of The Devil in Silver takes the reader inside New Hyde Mental Institution in Queens, New York, where the main character, Pepper, is admitted in handcuffs for a 72 hour psych evaluation at the end of a cop’s night shift.
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