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. ( )

Nominated for a Hugo, Nebula, and Shirley Jackson Awards, Victor LaValle’s riveting horror tale The Ballad of Black Tom, which is a spin and critique of the Lovecraft mythos, a man is beckoned to the threshold of apocalypse with the promise of seeing beyond the fabric of reality. The story is about Tommy Tester, a 20-year-old black man hustling to pay rent and take care of his father in Harlem in 1924. After being hired to deliver an arcane book to a mysterious woman in Queens, Tommy gets entangled in the plans of the wealthy Robert Suydam, who is intent on calling forth ancient gods, and Detective Malone, who investigates him.

As mentioned in LaValle’s tale, Tester is invited to be a part of Robert Suydam’s plot to conjure the Great Old Ones, ancient, tentacled creatures that are at the core of Lovecraft’s mythos. Suydam opens Tester’s eyes to the frightening cosmic indifference of the monsters. But when getting involved with Suydam brings down the law on Tommy, he realizes that in light of the racist criminality of the NYPD,

"a fear of cosmic indifference suddenly seemed comical, or downright naïve… he saw the patrol cars parked in the middle of the road like three great black hounds waiting to pounce on all these gathered sheep. What was indifference compared to malice?"

The world will always be a devil’s bargain, Tommy realizes. It’s just a matter of which devils he wants to deal with...

This is a story that juxtaposes Lovecraftian mythology against the racism and inequality of 1920s New York. It's poetic and it is frightening. The constant inequality that Tommy faces ends up being reason enough to justify drastic, desperate action to bring about the end of the novella, by dealing with forces Tommy doesn’t fully understand, but welcomes wholeheartedly by declaring:

"I'll take Cthulhu over you devils any day."

Lovecraft pulled back the veil to show us his racist monsters. A writer of intense, morbid and cloistered passions, Lovecraft expressed a pervasive disgust with physical existence itself, as well as the cosmic dread for which he has often been celebrated. Yet he reserved his most intimate revulsion for those human beings he regarded as, for example, "a bastard mess of stewing Mongrel flesh without intellect, repellent to the eye, nose and imagination."

LaValle pulls back the veil to show us how the monster of racism dooms us all. And The Ballad of Black Tom, although set in 1920s New York, couldn't be more timely. For the devil of racism and racial inequality is still with us today. ( )