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Tag: I have a dozen different rants about mental illness and mental health care in this damn country

Review: The Devil in Silver, Victor LaValle

The Devil in Silver is something like a horror thriller, set at an inpatient mental health facility in New York City, where the patients are being stalked–and sometimes killed–by the literal devil, who lives in their facility on a locked ward. Our protagonist Pepper teams up with a bipolar teenager called Loochie, a schizophrenic lifer called Dorrie, and a Ugandan immigrant, Coffee, to fight back against both the devil and the rigid structures of the hospital. This book vibrates with anger at the mental health system. The text itself is shot through with anger, and the acknowledgements afterward include a…

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