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The Changeling

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The Changeling

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Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Be prepared to get lost on this journey! A dark fairytale for modern audiences, this is Victor LaValle at his storytelling best. The Changeling pulls you into Apollo and Emma’s world, weaving themes of corruption with ancient folklore, preternatural love and an undercurrent of facing our monsters. Read it before the TV series. Read it after the TV series. Read it if you’ve read it before. It’s a story worth staying lost in.

“Mesmerizing . . . a dark fairy tale of New York, full of magic and loss, myth and mystery, love and madness.”—Marlon James, author of the Dark Star trilogy

NOW AN APPLE TV+ SERIES STARRING LAKEITH STANFIELD • ONE OF TIME’S 100 BEST FANTASY BOOKS OF ALL TIME

Winner of an American Book Award, a Locus Award for Best Horror Novel, a British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel, a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel • Nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award, an International Dublin Literary Award, a Mythopoeic Award for Literature

When Apollo Kagwa’s father disappeared, he left his son a box of books and strange recurring dreams. Now Apollo is a father himself—and as he and his wife, Emma, settle into their new lives as parents, exhaustion and anxiety start to take their toll. Apollo’s old dreams return and Emma begins acting odd. At first Emma seems to be exhibiting signs of postpartum depression. But before Apollo can do anything to help, Emma commits a horrific act and vanishes. Thus begins Apollo’s quest to find a wife and child who are nothing like he’d imagined. His odyssey takes him to a forgotten island, a graveyard full of secrets, a forest where immigrant legends still live, and finally back to a place he thought he had lost forever.

NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST HORROR BOOKS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • USA Today • The New York Public Library • NPR • BuzzFeed • Kirkus Reviews • Book Riot

“The thriller you won’t be able to put down.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“Intense, riveting . . . The story is a long, slow burn with a lingering sizzle.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“A modern-day tale of terror rooted in ancient myth and folklore, brimming with magical revelation and emotional truth.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812985870
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/06/2018
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	45,915
Product dimensions:	5.16(w) x 7.96(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Victor LaValle is the author of six previous works of fiction: three novels, two novellas, and a collection of short stories. His novels have been included in best-of-the-year lists by The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, The Nation, and Publishers Weekly, among others. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Key to Southeast Queens. He lives in New York City with his wife and kids and teaches at Columbia University.

Read an Excerpt

This fairy tale begins in 1968 during a garbage strike. In February New York City’s sanitation workers refused to pick up trash for eight straight days. One hundred thousand tons of garbage filled the sidewalks, spilled into the streets. Rats ran laps alongside morning joggers. Rubbish fires boiled the air. The five boroughs had been given up for dead. Still, there was some cracked magic in the air because that was when Lillian and Brian met. Each had journeyed from far--flung lands to find one another in Queens. Neither could’ve guessed the wildness that falling in love would unleash.
(Continues…)

Excerpted from "The Changeling"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Victor LaValle.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

From the B&N Reads Blog

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“The Best Monsters Are Our Anxieties Given Form” — The World of Victor LaValle

Victor LaValle’s award-winning stories will change the way you see our world. Known for his horrifying tales that confront deep fears and societal injustice, LaValle’s books will send shivers down your spine while occupying your mind long after you’ve put them down. The Changeling has been adapted for Apple TV+ and its first three episodes […]

Poured Over: Victor LaValle on Lone Women

All of them, in my mind … were wrestling with the same question, which is — what do I do with either the burden of family or what do I do with the found family that I’ve made? Victor LaValle’s Lone Women takes supernatural suspense to early 1900s Montana as one young woman sets out to leave her […]

Listen Up! April 2023 on Poured Over

Spring’s sprung, and we have some fabulous writers joining us on Poured Over in April. Bestselling authors like: Jeanette Walls (The Glass Castle), live from our flagship store on New York’s Union Square discussing HANG THE MOON. Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain) on THE TRACKERS, a terrific noir set during The Great Depression. Dennis Lehane (Mystic […]

The Modern and the Mythic Clash in Victor LaValle’s The Changeling

Apollo Kagwa is a book buyer, one of the few black men in the five boroughs to ply the trade. The child of a single mother (his recollection of his mysterious, absent father is murky at best), Apollo is growing ever more anxious for the birth of his first child with his wife Emma, a librarian. As […]

The combination of Grimm-ish allusion and social commentary might seem pat in the hands of less capable authors, but [Victor] LaValle executes the trick with style. . . . LaValle has written a story full of things to terrify not children but the parents who lose sleep worrying about how best to protect them.”—Time

“One of the reasons to read Victor LaValle’s novels is the simple sentence-by-sentence pleasure of them—they offer hundreds of baby dopamine hits, tiny baths for the prose snob’s reward system. . . . LaValle’s observations about race remain, as ever, both stinging and mordantly funny. . . . And his imagery is a source of immense satisfaction. . . . If monsters are your subject, writing like an angel helps.”—Jennifer Senior, The New York Times

“[A] bewitching masterpiece. . . . Like a woke Brothers Grimm, his clever new spin on the ages-old changeling myth is a modern fairy tale for the Trump era, taking on fatherhood, parenting, marriage, immigration, race and terrifying loss. . . . LaValle impressively maintains his storytelling momentum throughout The Changeling. . . . He not only recaptures the need for fairy tales but makes his essential reading as well.”—USA Today (four out of four stars)

“Victor LaValle’s fabulist ode to fatherhood and fairy tales offers a new take on themes as old as time. . . . Throughout western mythology, white men with swords have been the heroes while the rest of us watch, oohing and aahing, from the sidelines. With his genre-bending novel, The Changeling, Victor LaValle updates the epic narrative for the twenty-first century.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“Fiercely defies categorization. Written as a self-proclaimed ‘fairy tale’ in a punchy, inviting style, Mr. LaValle’s haunting tale weaves a mesmerizing web around fatherhood, racism, horrific anxieties and even To Kill a Mockingbird. And the backdrop for this rich phantasmagoria? The boroughs of New York.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“I was frequently startled by The Changeling’s piercingly beautiful insights into parenthood, childhood, [and] adulthood. . . . By turns enchanting, infuriating, horrifying, and heartbreaking, The Changeling is never less than completely engaging. . . . It’s a book that makes me want to seek people out to talk about it, to share together our own stories of reading it.”—NPR

“Fans of the macabre can’t miss the latest offering from prolific horror master Victor LaValle, which hurls us into the most harrowing abyss imaginable: parenthood. . . . Definitely scarier than anything you’ll hear around the campfire.”—Vulture

“This is a perfect summer horror read.”—Houston Chronicle

“Like a good Coen brothers film, this genre-defying, achingly literate phantasmagoria of a novel will work every nook and cranny of the imagination, taking the reader to places we’re either too afraid to visit or never knew existed.”—Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout

“Absolutely compelling, completely thrilling, The Changeling overflows with menace, wonder, and beauty.”—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

From the Publisher

…strange and wonderful…As [LaValle's] Lovecraftian novella The Ballad of Black Tom showed just a year ago, he's not timid…about conjuring horrors or about describing the emotions they evoke in their unfortunate victims. His horrors hurt, and keep hurting for a good while after the worst seems to be over…In The Changeling LaValle does more than his share of truth-telling, about the anxieties and ambivalences of modern parenting, the psychological value of the stories we tell ourselves and our children, and the rigors of survival in urban America. Most of the characters in his rambunctious fairy-tale epic—both good and bad, and all descended from immigrants—pay an awfully steep price for a sense of safety in this country, this city, or their ancestors paid it, decades and centuries ago. "No one wants to learn their history," the evil old guy (a chilling variant on Poe's Man of the Crowd) tells Apollo. "Not all of it." This novel doesn't try to get quite all of it in, but it's rich in the ambiguous history of the New World metropolis that is its noisy, clamorous setting.

The New York Times Book Review - Terrence Rafferty

One of the reasons to read Victor LaValle's novels is the simple sentence-by-sentence pleasure of them—they offer hundreds of baby dopamine hits, tiny baths for the prose snob's reward system. His imagination is unusually visual. His sensibility is so deadpan that it borders on a kind of derangement…The questions LaValle asks [in The Changeling] are hairy and urgent: How do we protect our children? Especially in the digital age?…Lavalle's observations about race remain, as ever, both stinging and mordantly funny…And his imagery is a source of immense satisfaction.

The New York Times - Jennifer Senior

04/10/2017
LaValle (The Ballad of Black Tom) displays his unique brand of trippy fabulism in his gripping latest, a modern-day fairy tale about a devoted father’s confrontation with evil. “The wildness had only begun,” says the narrator early on in the novel, a statement borne out by the eerie, fantastic events to come. The son of a Ugandan woman who raised him on her own, Apollo Kagwa scrapes together a living rummaging through estate sales for rare books. The novel takes its time warming up, somewhat leisurely describing Apollo courting, marrying, and having a baby with Emma Valentine, then becoming a so-called “New Dad”: a conscientious, diaper-changing, “emotionally available” modern man. Then the wildness begins with a staggering scene in which Apollo’s family is torn apart. In his quest to put himself and his family back together, Apollo, steered by a computer-savvy client interested in one of his rare books, journeys into New York City’s hidden enchanted places. There he encounters old magic, monsters, and wicked fathers. LaValle makes occasionally strained efforts to weave contemporary concerns—helicopter parenting, online oversharing, and Internet trolls—into this elemental fabric. Nonetheless, the novel works best when immersed in the violent, unpredictable realm of dark fairy tales, which, as one character tells Apollo, “are not for children.” (June)

Publishers Weekly

The Changeling

The Changeling

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