This was almost everything I could ask for in a Lovecraft retelling/inspired story. I loved Tom's character and felt for his sorrow. I loved the horror and dark justice towards the end. My major gripe about this was having to read from the cop's POV - I think I could've easily read another 200 pages of this if it meant more of Tom. I'm really eager to seek out more Lovecraft retellings along this vein. ( )

A nice short story for those that enjoyed Lovecraft Country ( )

LaValle addresses the racist beliefs of Lovecraft while still honoring the literary mythos that he created. With rhythmical timing and characters that are built on observation and little narration, LaValle paints a truly engrossing horror story. ( )

This is Victor LaValle's attempt to reconcile his obvious love of H.P. Lovecraft's weird fiction with the writer's frequently unpalatable racism. Here LaValle inverts the story of [b:The Horror at Red Hook|2582189|The Horror at Red Hook|H.P. Lovecraft|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1266939978s/2582189.jpg|2598040], wherein illegal immigrants in Brooklyn are corralled into a cultist's ceremony to open an interdimensional portal. The racist implication is that the many ethnicities of New York City are barely different then hideous aliens in their own right. LaValle reframes the story through the perspective of one of Lovecraft's "swarthy multitudes." Injecting racial empathy into a Lovecraft story is an admirable challenge but I suspect it is a futile one.
This is the trouble I have with almost all fanfiction. The universe an author creates is a reflection of who they are; the hopes, fears, prejudices, and life story of an author combine into an unconscious soup from which stories are ladled out. Many complain when a new writer in a TV show makes a beloved character behave inconsistently, but most fan works do this with an entire setting. Lovecraft was able to conjure so effectively his paranoid and hateful cosmos because he was a fundamentally paranoid and hateful person. The Ballad of Black Tom's attempts at reconciling this universe with a compassionate narrator results in bathetic tonal shifts. It's a real mess. This isn't to say that the cosmic horror genre is inseparable from a reactionary mode, only that it requires a unique setting to do so. ( )

Reading this after reading The Horror at Red Hook, I think made me appreciate this one even more. It is 10x better than Red Hook and it actually has a plot! In all honesty, I'm not sure I would have been interested in this one if I hadn't read Red Hook first, but I wanted to see how LaValle would take the train wreck of Red Hook and turn it into something interesting, and I think he did a good job with it. The characters were much more fleshed out & had more depth, the plot was interesting and engaging, the themes & message are definitely still relevant to today (though the story takes place in 1920s NY),
and I definitely prefer LaValle's writing style to Lovecraft's. Though for me, this story wasn't "scary," in terms of horror and overall creepiness vibes, I'd say this one also does much better than Lovecraft's Red Hook. ( )