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
I had a pretty bad time when I was an undergraduate at Cornell University. I failed out of school. I was much, much heavier.
For as long as I could remember, the person in E23 pasted the same Halloween decoration, a witch with a giant wart on her crone's nose, but whenever kids rang, the tenant wouldn't answer. At first, kids figured they'd just missed the guy: bad timing. But it seemed impossible that all of us missed him every year.
Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' was a story about the fear of immigration; the bad old bloodsucker swooping in from Eastern Europe and also preying upon 'our' vulnerable women.
'The Sundial' is written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh.
The horror genre is vast and full of brilliance. Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Herman Melville, the book of Esther. I'll happily join that list.
The devil that stayed with me most vividly was the one from the cover of Iron Maiden's 'Number of the Beast' album.
Since Queens is the most ethnically diverse plot of land on Earth, we had tenants from all over the globe. The whole world in one building.
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.