A basic premise that conceals a thousand little complications… The plot is as straightforward and deceptively simple as it ambitious: to take a story where Lovecraft vents his spleen against the city of immigrants he found himself in, and look at it from another point of view. Victor LaValle’s novella The Ballad of Black Tom goes where Lovecraft did not go, and explores the viewpoints that the man from Providence did not. But when Lovecraft lived in New York and wrote “The Horror at Red Hook,” inspired by the slums of Brooklyn where he found himself, alone in a single apartment in 1925, he only mentions Harlem in his letters-he did not try to set fiction there, did not try to put himself in the shoes of a black man in New York City. Harlem Unbound (2017) details the historical Harlem of the 20s and 30s for the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game, writers like Peter Cannon feature in briefly in fiction such as “Nautical-Looking Negroes” (1996) by Peter Cannon. Harlem is no longer terra incognita for the Cthulhu Mythos. Victor LaValle, dedication to The Ballad of Black Tom Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings. I’ll still be recommending it to others, and am glad to see most people have enjoyed it more than I did.For H. But while I appreciated LaValle’s commentary, I couldn’t connect to the character’s or the story itself and had a difficult time feeling invested in the novella. I found myself absolutely horrified by one scene, only to immediately see how it is paralleled by stories in the news today. What I found myself most struck by was how some of the explicitly racist bits could have been pulled straight out of today’s world even though the story takes place some 100 years ago. Lovecraft himself is infamously racist, so LaValle’s retelling is a commentary on racism. This is a retelling of one of Lovecraft’s stories, which I have not read.
I buddy read this with Hadeer, who enjoyed it and wrote a much more thorough review than I did. I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day. Goodreads | IndieBound | Author’s Website Published by Tor.com on February 16, 2016
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
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