
Stranger Things
Victor LaValle’s first book, Slapboxing with Jesus (1999), offered realistic depictions of working-class young people in the five boroughs, but by his second novel, The Ecstatic (2002), something stranger, if not outright weird, had begun to creep in. A little more weirdness came with each book: Big Machine follows a man who, having survived a death-obsessed cult, is recruited, at a bus station, to join what might be called a paranormal investigation squad. You could attribute some of the bizarre moments to the characters’ fraught mental states; perhaps, you might think, it’s all in their minds.