The Ballad of Black Tom

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 show more 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. show less

I read the book in one sitting, all 86 pages of it. It was that good.

Having read Lovecraft Country, I could empathize with Tom and understand his struggle and challenges of living in white America. The humiliation, pain, and powerlessness of having to deal with systemic racism shine through the pages quite well. This quote, in particular, summarizes it well:

His night with Robert Suydam returned to him, all of it, all at once. The breathless terror with which the old man spoke of the Sleeping King. A fear of cosmic indifference suddenly seemed comical, or downright naive. Tester looked back to Malone and Mr. Howard. Beyond them he saw the police forces at the barricades as they muscled the crowd of Negroes back; he saw the decaying

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facade of his tenement with new eyes; 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?

"Indifference would be such a relief," Tommy said.

More than that, it handles the Lovecraftian themes quite well, especially in its vagueness regarding the ancient Ones. I loved how he brought in Cthulhu, especially in how Tom becomes a symbol of vengeance, drawing upon Cthulhu's power to destroy humanity (in due time) that he's come to loathe.

I also loved the idea of the Outside and how simply Lavalle depicted it. I especially liked the integration of Ma Att and the vagueness of the enormity of her power. I loved how Tom transformed into an entity beyond time and space, yet still grounded by his father's razor and music. And finally, I loved how Lovecraft, on whose story this novella is founded on, is integrated into the story.

It's a great, quick read. Highly recommended. show less

4.5 stars!

“Nobody ever thinks of himself as a villain, does he? Even monsters hold high opinions of themselves.”

In The Ballad of Black Tom we have a Lovecraftian novella, written by a phenomenal black writer. It's set in the 20's which was not exactly the best time to be a black person in this country. LaValle has taken the Lovecraft story "The Horror at Red Hook" and turned it on its head. To that I say, Bravo!!

As a blues fan, I'll add an extra BRAVO for the Son House lyrics. "Don't you mind people grinning in your face?" Why, yes. As a matter of fact, I do.

My highest recommendation!

Lovecraft in Flatbush, well also Harlem and other NYC areas, 1920s. This deftly provides all that's needed to understand how the choice between Cthulhu and the status quo might fall out in Cthulhu's favor.

A book with a grabbing premise and setting from the get-go. Juxtaposing the inhumanity of the Outer Gods with that of systematic oppression is a great move, and it does a solid job of setting up a kind of dialectic relationship between the state/status quo embodied by Detective Malone and rebellion against it enacted by Tom.

Some aspects of the overall narrative do feel a little weird though, specifically in terms of how the novel recycles racist rhetoric: racists think Tom is a monster, and then he actually becomes one; racists think immigrants are conspiring with one another, and then they actually are. That first thread is deconstructed a little towards the end, but I think both deserved a more thorough dissection--the story could show more have gone deeper into how mainstream culture constructs these narratives or alternative narratives that arise within marginalized communities or something, rather than allowing them to go largely unremarked upon. As it stands, it feels like the novella struggles to decide between engaging with the anxieties--racial or otherwise--depicted in Lovecraft's original work, and dismissing them to focus on the more sympathetic worries of marginalized people themselves, and I think the story suffers from it.

I was also really confused by one specific passage on historic immigration to the United States. This quote introduces Detective Malone's role in anti-immigrant policing: "The legal immigrants of Europe--German and English, Scottish and Italian, Jewish, French, Irish, and Scandinavian--all were welcomed through the immigration center on Ellis Island. A number of Chinese were permitted through this channel as well. But what about the rest? Malone's beat in Brooklyn brought him through neighborhoods thick with Syrians and Persians, Africans, too. How did they arrive in Brooklyn in such hordes?" I'm not an expert on immigration history, but there are a few things I find weird about this passage.

First of all, the novel takes place in the same year that the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, which redefined America's immigration system for the next forty years--namely by making it massively more restrictive, especially to Asian Americans. If the novel is interested in immigration, why doesn't it make any reference to this incredibly important piece of legislation?

Secondly, at this time, not all immigrants from Europe were as welcome in the United States as the quote suggests. Restricting the number of Central and South European immigrants to the US, which included Italians and many Jews, was an explicit goal of both the 1924 law and the Emergency Quota Act three years previous.

Thirdly, it's strange to single out the Chinese as a permitted ethnicity when they were at this point the most restricted and policed group of immigrants in the entire United States. From 1882 until 1943, Chinese laborers were completely barred from legal immigration to the United States (with the exception of members of specific skilled professions). From 1892, Chinese residents were required to carry resident permits demonstrating their right to be in the United States or face deportation, the only group of immigrants facing this requirement. So they were pretty far from any kind of acceptance in 1924. Also, I can't imagine many Chinese were entering the United States through Ellis Island--most traveled through Angel Island on the West Coast.

Finally, I'm pretty sure that at this point in history, regulation of immigration was generally enforced at the ports themselves, rather than by dedicated domestic police forces. With the exception of the Chinese, most immigrants didn't even need documentation to show their immigration was legal, and were not subject to deportation unless they faced additional legal issues. And I don't know why even a racist cop would be puzzled by the presence of certain ethnic groups in New York in 1924, when almost completely open immigration was the norm in the United States up until three years prior.

It's just a short passage, but I was so surprised by the amount of ahistorical claims it made that I had to stop reading and go refresh my understanding of America's immigration history before continuing. Maybe it's not a huge problem in the grand scheme of things, but I do think that if the aim of your novel is to bring life to a group of marginalized and maligned people, you have a duty to be true to the lives they actually lived, rather than making the easy pull from modern rhetoric surrounding immigration. I hope my summary clears up some of the misconceptions present in the text and demonstrates how modern the United States (anti-)immigration legal infrastructure and ideology is within the scope of the country's history. show less

"The Ballad Of Black Tom" is a powerful novella which appropriates H, P, Lovecraft's occult lore and ancient gods and places a young black man at the centre of the story.

I'm not a Lovecraft fan but I was fascinated by the way Victor LaValle took possession and Lovecraft's world and used it to explore a black man's rage at how he and his father are treated by the white men.

In less than 150 pages, we follow Charles Thomas Tester's transformation from a savvy twenty-year-old hustler with a passing knowledge of the occult and a flair for dissembling to Black Tom, a bringer of death and a herald of doom. The means for this transformation comes from occult knowledge provided acquired from the rich power-hungry white people who buy his time. show more The motive for the transformation comes from the contempt and violence he receives from the white men around him.

The text is vivid and full of energy. LaValle perfectly captures the sense of threat a lone black man experiences when venturing outside of Harlem. The scene where Tester learns of the brutal act of violence by a white private detective is chilling and makes a perfect trigger for his transformation into Black Tom.

Towards the end of the novella, Tester reflects on his own transformation into a monster by the way in which white people saw him, saying of white people:

“Every time I was around them, they acted like I was a monster. So I said goddamnit, I’ll be the worst monster you ever saw!”
He also recognises that his rage has cost him his connection with his own community and stripped him of his humanity.

H. P. Lovecraft's racism is well known so it interested me that the racist white private detective's surname is Howard, which was Lovecraft's first name. show less

This is the second rewrite of Lovecraft's Horror at Red Hook I've read this year, after Moore's Neonomicon. I suppose there's a reason that story feels relevant to revisit in the 21st century; on one hand, it's easily one of Lovecraft's most blatantly racist, misogynist and just downright... messy stories. On the other, it's about an America (specifically, a pre-gentrification Brooklyn) struggling to find its identity in the conflict between haves and havenots, Anglos and illegal immigrants (specifially, Syrians), Order and Chaos.

There's always the question if you can rewrite Lovecraft without acknowledging and doing something with the less appetizing bits of his writing. Moore skipped part of that by setting his rewrite in the show more more-or-less present, post-aforementioned-gentrification, and partly by simply revelling in it through his openly racist narrator. LaValle does something cleverer; brings more life to 1925 New York than Lovecraft did, shifts the focus, offers a counter-narrative, plays a counterpoint on a beat-up blues guitar and Son House's lyrics. There's more than one story in America. As people have pointed out, what's horrible in Lovecraft - the realisation that you're not the centre of the universe, that being a bigoted white man doesn't automatically earn you points with a cold uncaring cosmos - is just what everyone else has always had to live with, and built their stories around.

Who's that writing - John the Revelator

Enter Black Tom, who knows his people always lose, but at least he's going to matter. show less