Victor LaValle

Author Victor LaVelle's appreciation for the history of horror and fantasy fiction informed his critical praised novels and stories, including The Devil in Silver (2012) and The Changeling, which explored the genres' themes and tropes through the prisms of race and religion. Born February 3, 1972 in New York City, New York, he was raised in its Queens borough by his mother, who hailed from Uganda, and a white father who was largely absent from his son's life. LaValle developed an interest in fiction, and in particular the short stories and novels of such celebrated horror and fantasy novelists as Stephen King, Shirley Jackson and H.P. Lovecraft, whose elaborate mythology involving ancient, malevolent gods intervening in the lives of humans would have significant influence over his later work. After earning his bachelor's degree in English from Cornell and an MFA from Columbia University, LaValle issued his first work of fiction,Slapboxing with Jesus in 1999; the collection of short stories, which focused on young black and Latino men in New York City, won a PEN Open Book Award, and established LaValle as an author on the rise. He followed this with his first novel, The Ecstatic (2002), which focused on one of the characters from Slapboxing, a young college dropout whose family attempts to rescue him as he begins to exhibit signs of schizophrenia. A finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, the book's exploration of a mind's perception of reality while in the grip of mental illness signaled the direction that his subsequent works would take; Big Machine (2009) followed a former drug addict and doomsday cult survivor who is dispatched by a mysterious organization to eliminated one of its members. Though steeped in suspense and speculative fiction, the novel also explored issues of race and faith, which again, would become recurring themes in LaValle's work. The following year, LaValle was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and issued his third novel, The Devil in Silver, in 2012. Though closer in tone to outright horror, the story - about a man mistakenly sent to a mental hospital, where he discovers that a monster stalks its residents - again incorporated issues of faith into its unnerving text. Four years would pass before LaValle released his fourth novel, The Ballad of Black Tom (2016). The book paid tribute to Lovecraft while also addressing the accusations of racism that swirled around some of its text by reworking Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook" from the perspective of a black man living in Harlem. A winner or finalist of numerous horror and fantasy awards, it preceded his 2017 novel The Changeling, which again addressed fantasy and supernatural literature from the perspective of race. The novel, about a husband and wife whose search for their child's true origin takes them to secret worlds beneath New York City, examined the idea of a mythical quest as undertaken by a black hero and not the traditional white European figures.