Slot Machine

Slot Machine (1995), a young adult novel by American author Chris Lynch, follows Elvin Bishop and his best friends, Mikey and Frank as they attend a three-week orientation camp ahead of their freshman year at a Catholic private school for boys. Overweight, unathletic, and sensitive, Elvin is dismayed to discover that the camp is a thinly-disguised athletic recruitment program, designed to give the Christian Brothers Academy an (illegal) jumpstart to the school athletic season. As Mikey guides Elvin through humiliation on a series of different sports fields, handsome, popular Frank is subjected to brutal hazing by the upperclassmen. Described by Kirkus Reviews as “hilarious and horrifying (sometimes at once),” Slot Machine was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. Lynch is a previous finalist for the National Book Award (Young People’s Literature) and the Michael L. Printz Award.

Together with his best friends, Mikey and Frank, Elvin Bishop is heading off for “21 Nights with the Knights,” a summer camp for new starters at the Christian Brothers Academy for Boys. Elvin is an introverted, indoors sort of kid, so he’d rather just stay home, but his mother puts her foot down. She is worried that unless he stretches himself a little during the summer, his first semester of high school will be too much to handle.

From the moment the three friends board the bus, Elvin knows he is going to be the “fat kid,” victim number one for the athletic sadists. Things get much worse when they arrive among “the idyllic rolling green hills of the St. Paul’s Seminary Retreat Center” (as the school’s brochure has it). There, Elvin realizes that the so-called summer camp is, in reality, a recruitment program for the school’s athletics teams. As well as fat, Elvin is uncoordinated and a self-declared “non-athlete.”



The school’s “Dean of Men” welcomes the new intake with a speech, in which he declares that every boy has a “slot,” and that it is his duty to find it. Elvin is unconvinced: “The whole slotting thing was degrading, and…I had a lot of unslottable intangibles to contribute to the school.”

Based on his weight, Elvin is assigned to the football team. At first, Elvin warms to the idea of playing one of the more cerebral positions: “I have the mind of a quarterback,” he declares. Naturally, the coaches think he has the body of a lineman, and he is humiliatingly crunched until the coaches declare that football is clearly not Elvin’s “slot.”

Elvin manages to remain good-humored. He tells his story with wry detachment:
“They gave us an hour after dinner to either barf it up or keep it down. I figured it was one of those trial-by-fire things that would make men out of us.” He is especially funny in the letters he writes to his mother, whom he half-jokingly accuses of abandoning him.



After his washout on the football field, Elvin is assigned to the baseball team, where he tortures his knees sliding around and fails to catch a single ball.

Elvin and Mikey’s mothers arrive for Parents’ Weekend. They are amused by the macho tone of the camp, but Elvin’s mother pays no heed to his complaints. Elvin’s bunk counselor, Thor, provides a more sympathetic ear and helps him to adjust to the camp’s system.

Elvin descends the sports hierarchy to the wrestling team, and here, for the first time, he begins to enjoy himself. He prefers going it alone in the ring to team sports, and he works hard to improve, with his friends’ help. Eventually, in his final match, he manages to pin his opponent.



However, with Thor’s encouragement, Elvin has begun to resist the program’s structure. He and Mikey begin exploring the hills beyond the camp, where they experience exhilarating freedom.

Meanwhile, their friend Frank, used to being one of the popular kids, is determined to earn the approval of the upperclassmen’s in-crowd. They spend their time drinking and challenging each other to sexual dares; when they realize how desperate Frank is for their approval, they subject him to a series of humiliating hazing rituals, which become increasingly brutal. Shocked, Elvin and Mikey tell Frank it’s stupid of him to put up with it, but Frank will not be dissuaded.

Finally, bumped from the athletics program altogether, Elvin is assigned to a “slot” no one told him about: the Arts Sector. Here, Elvin meets fellow misfits and discovers treasures like the library. In Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Elvin encounters a role that feels like a good fit, that of interested observer and commentator. Joyfully, he composes a limerick to celebrate his calling: “There once was a boy from Massachusetts/ Whose mother thought him dumb fat and useless/ She threw him a bone/ Ninety miles from home/ And today he was slotted with fruitses.”