Victor LaValle
Victor LaValle
Victor LaValleis an American author who was raised in the Flushing and Rosedale neighborhoods of Queens, New York. He is the author of a short-story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus and three novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine and The Devil in Silver. LaValle writes fiction primarily, though he has also written essays and book reviews for GQ, Essence Magazine, The Fader, and The Washington Post, among others...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth3 February 1972
CountryUnited States of America
People use the notion of God to bully people and hurt people, when we can use the concept to respect and uplift.
No one ever knows if a book is good until they read the book.
My three obsessions are mental illness, horror and religion.
Lumpy and lazy; I aspired to lethargy. In the second year of university, I missed half my classes just because I couldn't pull myself out of bed.
Lonely women destroy themselves; lonely men threaten the world.
It's tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy.
In the end, what's any good reader really hoping for? That spark. That spell. That journey.
In fiction, it's a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.
I've spent my life visiting a handful of people who are very close to me when they've been committed to one hospital or another in New York.
I'd read at a much higher-than-average grade level since, well, grade school.
I weighed 25 stone, and I didn't stand nine feet tall, so the weight didn't sit well on me. As big as a house? No. I was as big as an estate.
I wanted to write a story set in the Lovecraftian universe that didn't gloss over the uglier implications of his worldview.
I spend lots of time on the Web, some of it even useful.
I know that many authors say editors don't edit anymore, but that's not been true in my experience.