5/19/2023 0 Comments Big machine by victor lavalle![]() ![]() ![]() In that letter is a bus ticket, and a reminder that he made a promise. And then, one day, Ricky gets a letter from an unknown sender. It’s not what he wanted, and you get the sense that Ricky could be doing more, but he’s made his peace with how he’s ended up. ![]() To try to summarize Big Machine is a fool’s errand, but the basic hook is a good one: it’s the story of Ricky Rice, a black man who’s ended up working as a janitor in a bus station. And it works all the better for the way it tosses all of those into a blender and just embraces the chaos that results. And rarely has that description applied to a book more than it does to Victor LaValle’s incredible, ambitious, surreal Big Machine, a book that’s part horror, part weird tale, part meditation on class and race in America, part exploration of faith and doubt, and part comic book story. But give me something ambitious, something wild, something that defies easy description – and you have my attention. Another vampire book, another zombie apocalypse? Yawn. The more books I read, the more excited I get when I read something new and unclassifiable. ![]()
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