Like Stephen King, he locates mystery and sinister threat in ubiquitous, commonplace things. Convictions about religion, racial stereotypes, even child-rearing techniques become particularly suspect in LaValle’s cosmology. Both 2009’s Big Machine and The Changeling center on the idea that people must periodically question what they believe and why. A closer look at his body of work reveals autobiographical obsessions and pet themes that he continues to develop from novel to novel.
Although more than capable of crafting what some genre writers puckishly term “mundane fiction,” LaValle knows that contemporary reality cannot always be adequately described by realistic literary fiction. Victor LaValle’s fourth novel, The Changeling, is a supernatural horror tale as subtle as a slipstream. Because speculative genres like fantasy, horror, and science fiction specialize in exploring unusual perspectives via myth and metaphor, the literature of “what if” is potentially more useful to any truly ambitious author than the starchy literature of “what is.”
To accurately reflect this truth in fiction, writers must become so sensitive to pluralistic points of view that their storytelling speaks of, for, and to multiple perspectives at once. Today’s global societies are not only multilingual and multicultural, but multi-perceptual as well. Historically speaking, this has always been a mad, mad world, but the 21st century reveals the hallucinatory essence of each day’s “new normal” more vividly than even visionaries like Guy Debord or William Gibson could have predicted.
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