He is the author of a short-story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus, and five novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, The Changeling, and Lone Women.

[1] LaValle writes fiction primarily, though he has also written essays and book reviews for GQ, Essence Magazine, The Fader, and The Washington Post, among other publications.

Victor LaValle was born on February 3, 1972, and raised in the Flushing and Rosedale neighborhoods of Queens, New York by a single mother who had emigrated from Uganda in her twenties.

This book received even wider critical acclaim, earning comparisons to writers such as Ken Kesey, Chester Himes, and John Kennedy Toole.

The novel tells the story of Ricky Rice, an ex-junkie survivor of a suicide cult whose life is changed when a mysterious letter arrives summoning him to a remote compound in Vermont.

It is a retelling of the H. P. Lovecraft story "The Horror at Red Hook" from the point of view of a young black man living in Harlem with a reference to the Nation of Gods and Earths.

[13][14] The story follows protagonist Adelaide Henry, a single woman who, along with a heavy trunk, leaves her family farm in California to establish a homestead in Montana.