“The Best Monsters Are Our Anxieties Given Form” — The World of Victor LaValle 

If you like Jordan Peele’s horror films, then Victor LaValle’s most recent book, Lone Women, is a chilling next read about the American West. Adelaide Henry carries her secret in an enormous steamer trunk and flees her hometown to become one of the “lone women” taking up the government on its offer of free land to anyone able to cultivate it. Experience twentieth-century America like never before with this inventive horror story about a woman desperate to bury her past, then listen to Victor LaValle on our Poured Over podcast to learn about the history that inspired this novel and more. 

The Devil in Silver is a thrilling novel that is both suspenseful and at times humorous. When Pepper first steps into the psychiatric ward at New Hyde Hospital, the last thing he expects is a terrifying creature that hunts the inmates. He gathers three others to try to kill the monster, but the question remains: can you kill the Devil?  

Victor LaValle reimagines H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos in The Ballad of Black Tom, a novella about magic in New York City. When Charles Thomas Tester, a con artist who resides in Harlem, delivers an occult tome to a sorceress in Queens, he unwittingly unlocks a more sinister magic. This creepy and thought-provoking story pays homage to the Jazz Age while recognizing the social and racial issues that were central to the time.   

A dark fairytale of corruption, ancient folklore and facing our monsters, The Changeling is a terrifying story you won’t be able to look away from. As a child, Apollo’s father left him behind with books and strange dreams, and as an adult, those dreams return and his wife starts acting strangely. His wife’s horrific action turns his life upside down in this genre-bending book about parenthood, race and anxiety.