Victor LaValle - The Ecstatic

Rookie Season: Debuts | Week 39º

Jul 17, 2025

Extra seasoning for your everyday food for thought

Genre: Horror, Fantasy, Humorous Fiction

“I nodded. There were many suggestions. Everyone wanted to make me better, but we couldn’t even name the problem.”
— Victor LaValle, The Ecstatic

Back Cover (Crown Publishers):

“Something is wrong with Anthony—our 318-pound hero—and it’s getting worse. A monster has caught his uncle and his mother; now it wants Anthony. Mental illness has been transmitted through his family’s blood. The three women in his life—his mother, younger sister, and grandmother—find him naked and disoriented in his off-campus college apartment and take him home to Queens, each determined to fix him in her own peculiar way. But his presence soon turns their house into a semisuburban asylum.”

Victor LaValle’s debut novel The Ecstatic (2002) opens with a ghastly line from our main protagonist, Anthony, “They drove a green rented car into central New York State to find me living wild in my apartment.”

Victor LaValle was raised in Queens, New York and is a Writing Professor in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including: the World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Shirley Jackson Award, American Book Award, and the key to Southeast Queens.

He is also the creator and writer of two comic books Victor LaValle's DESTROYER and EVE.12

“It’s only after a hundred years that crusades seem inevitable; after all that time the unjust are easily named. But in the midst of history who knows his role?”
— Victor LaValle, The Ecstatic

Did You Know?

Did you know that many of Victor LaValle’s fictional characters battle mental health challenges within his works?

Tell Me More . . .

Taken from an Interview With Victor LaValle (Erin Armstrong, TIMBER Talks):

Erin Armstrong: Something that has shown up multiple times in your characters is mental illness, or the looming threat of it, and how dismissive people can be towards them. Mos Def named his 2009 album after your book, The Ecstatic.

“Mos Def titled the album after one of his favorite novels, Victor LaValle's *The Ecstatic* (2002), believing its titular phrase evoked his singular musical vision.”

He said of the title, “The term was used in the 17th and 18th centuries to describe people who were either mad or divinely inspired and consequently dismissed as kooks.” You’ve been pretty open about your own battle with mental illness in the past–– did you ever feel dismissed because of it?

Victor LaValle: Mental illness has absolutely been one of the fundamental concerns of my early work, or really all my work up until the novel I’m writing now. Only five books in before I finally decided to give it a bit of a rest! It’s an essential concern for me because of my own struggles, but even more so because I’ve got a few generations of family members who’ve dealt with clinical issues of mental illness and so, inevitably, it’s become a part of my world view.

Some Food For Thought:

“Many people who focus entirely on give, give, give end up overwhelmed, fatigued, and stressed. And chronic stress has been linked3 to a number of health risks, including conditions like diabetes, cancer, and mental illnesses.”4

“To err is human,” once wrote Alexander Pope.

But so is telling stories, dreaming, imagining things about ourselves and others and thinking about the future and analyzing the past.5

Be well, my friends, and make sure to take care of yourself (mind, body, and soul).