We all suspect that the system is out to get us, but it comes down particularly hard on Pepper. What he sees as an act of chivalry ends in a tussle with three undercover cops who dump him in the New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital for a 72-hour observation because there’s no overtime to pay them for processing him properly.
Pepper eventually descends into an enforced chemically induced stupor as his institutionalisation is extended because he refuses to follow orderly Scoth Tape’s advice. He knows Pepper shouldn’t be there but warns that, “if you keep acting stupid, you’re going to be staying a whole lot longer”.
Attempts at good behaviour are further thwarted by the antiquated minotaur-like figure who roams the hospital’s maze at night, terrorising the inmates. Pepper has a direct encounter but the staff ignore it, warning their charges to stay away from the silver door this devil is kept behind and administering more drugs
The obvious comparison here is Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest but LaValle pre-empts this by having patients discuss it. Peter Benchley’s Jaws, another novel where a mostly unseen monster circles the boat, also features and there’s a hint of the madness of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 when Pepper refuses medication only to be informed: “If you were healthy, you wouldn’t refuse!”
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While LaValle’s main target is the failing US health system, his sprawling and slightly in-need-of-pruning novel takes in everything from the New York police shooting of Guinean student Amadou Diallo in 1999 – when 41 shots are aimed at one of Pepper’s fellow inmates – to references to Bobby Sands and Van Gogh’s letters.
His prose style also veers wildly with some hit-and-miss humour, reader-directed asides and even a section where a hospital rat takes over as the main protagonist. Despite the devil of the title, this is less about jump scares than it is about the slowly building horror of Pepper being consumed by a system which, as his Dr Anand puts it, isn’t actually broken because it protects those in power. “The system is working exactly right for those it was intended for. That’s why it hasn’t been fixed. Because it isn’t broken!” The doctor then asks, “Can you imagine anything more terrible?”, which is a very good question.
