The Ballad of Black Tom

A few months ago, I read Matt Huff’s great Lovecraft Country, a fascinating horror novel that blended supernatural tropes and Lovecraftian nightmares with Jim Crow and American racial histories. It was a fascinatingly ambitious piece of horror, one that gave equal time to the horror of lynchings and to the nightmares that might lurk beyond the cosmos, and played them nicely off of each other. And although it was more conventionally plotted than I might have preferred, I couldn’t think of much else I’d read like that before.But now, I’ve read The Ballad of Black Tom, in which Victor LaValle repurposes Lovecraft’s own story, hijacks the racism, and turns it into a true Lovecraftian nightmare – from the point of view of a black man in 1920’s America. And given Lovecraft’s own vile racial views – and the fact that the story LaValle has repurposed makes those views quite evident – that makes The Ballad of Black Tom even more ambitious than Lovecraft Country. Luckily, it’s more successful on pretty much every level – the tale is scarier, the politics more complex, and the writing better.LaValle uses as his inspiration one of Lovecraft’s lesser tales, “The Horror at Red Hook,” which tells the story of Robert Suydam, an upper-class New Yorker who starts living amongst the – gasp! – immigrants of the Red Hook neighborhood in New York, largely to learn of their primitive, savage ways and their arcane rituals. (The story is available online; it’s not exactly a great read on its own terms, and that’s without the hateful subtext that runs through it all. But it is worth reading to appreciate how perfectly LaValle upends it.) LaValle changes his focus, though, telling the story through the eyes of Charlie Thomas Tester, a young Harlem man who’s making ends meet with odd jobs and an ability to fake his way through a few songs. And when Tom gets involved with Robert Suydam’s mystical rites, The Ballad of Black Tom plunges full-bore into Lovecraftian nightmares and madness.The Ballad of Black Tom walks a fascinating line between paying homage to Lovecraft and attacking him for his virulent views (indeed, it’s not a coincidence that the story’s most racist character is named Howard), and the mix speaks to LaValle’s mix of admiration and distaste for the man. After all, there’s little way to be a horror writer working today and not be aware of, or influenced by, Lovecraft, but it’s also jarring to begin reading his horror and suddenly be confronted with his racist, xenophobic worldview.And yet, as much as I’ve talked about the subtext, none of that would matter if The Ballad of Black Tom weren’t such a great, crackling read. LaValle splits the book into two halves, and while I don’t want to give anything away, the understanding of what he’s setting up in the second half is fascinating, allowing LaValle to turn his subtext into text, and unite the dual horrors of racism and Lovecraftian nightmares into something rich, satisfying, and genuinely unsettling. Indeed, most of The Ballad of Black Tom is disturbing, great weird fiction; that it manages to be both in the Lovecraftian tradition (far more so than Lovecraft Country) and yet wholly, unmistakably modern is just one of its joys. Part psychological horror story, part anti-hero tale, part cosmic horror, LaValle has a lot going here, and mixes it all together to make a nasty, dark tale that’s well worth the short time it takes to read.

TL;DR: Excellent lovecraftian story focused around a likeable protagonist. Highly recommended.Fiction at its best lets us experience a life different than our own. It expands our perspective and allows us to practice empathy. If we're mindful, we can learn about the marginalized, about the oppressed, and about those who struggle daily to survive. A good story can show us the survival mechanisms that others need to get through life. In Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom, the tropes and set decoration of a Lovecraftian horror story dress up a story about the African American experience. Horror as a genre is never really about the scary monsters; the stories are about the monstrous things humans do to each other. The Ballad of Black Tom shows the monstrous treatment of African Americans in an excellent revenge story set in jazz age New York.The Ballad of Black Tom works well as a period piece. The writing, as expected from a Tor.com book, is top notch. When I think of Lovecraft, I think of highly ornate, purple prose. Victor LaValle chose to go the opposite route. It's clear, precise language that doesn't outshine the story. The world building was an efficient balance of description and atmosphere. It was easy to see New York in that time. The Ballad of Black Tom hooked me quickly; I read it in two settings, which is a sprint for me. Charles Thomas Tester, the main character, is likable, and his point of view carries most of the mystery. How he acted depended on where he's located in the city and to whom he's talking. It's as if society forced him into having a split personality. The way he navigates New York and the social conventions of the time is fascinating and heartbreaking. The fact that African Americans still have to do this is even more heartbreaking.H.P. Lovecraft is a giant of the SFF genre, but I've not read much of his work. And not because of his repugnant, retroactive views on anything not WASP. I just never got around to reading his mythos being aware of it for a long time. For such a problematic starting point, the mythos has captured people's imagination and grown beyond Lovecraft's wildest dreams. Or maybe, at this point, nightmares. People who would have terrified him are playing in his sandbox. Some critics and readers say these newer interpretations are better. Due to my lack of knowledge, I can't confirm this. What I can confirm is that Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom is an excellent story all on its own. For those more well read in the Cthulhu mythos, Mr. LaValle weaves the horror of humanity with the cosmic terror of the Lovecraftian canon.At 150 pages, this is a quick read. I think it's the right length. While I have no doubt that Mr. LaValle could expand the world, could detail more of the terrifying experiences, it packs a solid punch at its current length. The ending was truly epic with a twist of the knife as an exit. To me, The Ballad of Black Tom says a lot about anger in humans. When we are pushed and degraded and debased, it is really a surprise that we lash out? Sometimes, we lash out in anger, and the consequences are hell to deal with.The Ballad of Black Tom is a quick, easy read but not a light one. The book puts the reader face-to-face with horrible human behavior. In current day America, this behavior seems to be making a comeback. There's a lot to learn in this book, and I'll revisit it. Horror isn't a genre that I read regularly, but if the genre is this strong, then I'll have to read more of it. The Ballad of Black Tom is an excellent look at the everyday horrors of humanity and what happens when humans are pushed to their limits. Highly recommended.8.5/10

Read on its own, Victor Lavalle’s The Ballad of Black Tom is a fine example of a novella in the hybrid genre of the weird tale – or perhaps, more accurately, the new weird. In The Weird Tale (1990) and The Modern Weird Tale (2001), S.T. Joshi defines the weird tale as a retrospective category of speculative fiction, published from 1880 to 1940, that is essentially philosophical in virtue of representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out world view. The new weird was initially associated with China Miéville in the UK and subsequently Jeff VanderMeer in the US (although both Miéville and Joshi reject the term). In their introduction to the short story collection, The New Weird (2008), VanderMeer and his wife, Ann, distinguish the new weird from the weird tale in terms of the former combining real-world complexity with transgressive fantasy and contemporary political relevance. Read in conjunction with H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook”, which was first published in Weird Tales in January 1927, The Ballad of Black Tom is a deliberate and definitive deconstruction of the original short story. Lavalle takes one of Lovecraft’s most overtly and viciously racist narratives and reimagines the character, action, and setting represented by Lovecraft from a twenty-first century that is conscious of racial prejudice, social injustice, and police impunity. Lavalle dates his story to 1924, when Lovecraft and his wife, Sonia Greene, were living in Flatbush and the real horror of Red Hook for Lovecraft was the extent of its multiculturalism, which stimulated his racism and xenophobia and fears of miscegenation and evolutionary reversal. In contemporary terms, Lovecraft believed he saw first-hand at Red Hook evidence of the white genocide conspiracy theory, which is one of the reasons he returned to his sanctuary in Providence, Rhode Island, after less than two years. Lavalle is an African American novelist and short story writer from Queens, who lives in Washington Heights, and his complex relationship with Lovecraft is revealed in the dedication of the novella, ‘For H.P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings’.“The Horror at Red Hook” is a traditional occult detective story and Lovecraft’s occult detective – Thomas F. Malone of the New York Police Department – is a sensitive, cerebral hero who pursues his supernatural inquiries while serving the public in his role as a police detective: ‘He had the Celt’s far vision of weird and hidden things, but the logician’s quick eye for the outwardly unconvincing; an amalgam which had led him far afield in the forty-two years of his life, and set him in strange places for a Dublin University man born in a Georgian villa near Phoenix Park.’ The ‘Dublin dreamer’ was a poet in his youth, is a regular contributor to the Dublin Review, and employs his ‘experiment in police work’ to investigate the macabre, the rotten, and the terrifying that lurks beneath the veneer of the everyday. Lovecraft employs a third-person narration that adheres very closely to Malone’s perspective, with which the reader is intended to empathise. The story is divided into seven sections, the first of which introduces Malone with pathos, a tall, well-built, ‘wholesome looking’, ‘normal-featured, and capable-looking’ man who is convalescing in Pascoag, Rhode Island, and suffering from some kind of post-traumatic psychological disorder brought on by a particularly harrowing incident during his police service. Lavalle’s novella consists of eighteen short chapters, divided into two equal parts, “Tommy Tester” and “Malone”. The novella is also narrated in the third person, from Charles Thomas Tester’s (known first as Tommy and then Black Tom) point of view in the first part and Malone’s in the second. The chapters written from the point of view of Tom, a twenty-year old African American hustler with a limited command of both music and magic, adhere closely to his perspective, inviting the reader’s empathy. In contrast, Lavalle maintains a narrative distance from Malone in those chapters written from his perspective and Tom replaces Malone as the protagonist of the story. Lavalle’s Malone is described as follows: ‘Tall and thin and lantern-jawed, his eyes dispassionate and surveying.’ Malone is dispassionate, insensitive, and pitiless. He has been assigned to the Butler Street station in Brooklyn for the last six years and is content to be complicit in the structural, institutional, and interpersonal racial violence perpetrated by the police in order to pursue his supernatural inquiries. This departure from Lovecraft’s characterisation is indicative of departures from the original sequence of events to come, with Lavalle employing the conceit that Lovecraft based his story on unreliable newspaper reports of the events.In both the short story and the novella, the sequence of events that underpin the plot are initiated by Robert Suydam, the wealthy scion of an old Dutch family who lives in a mansion in Martense Street in Flatbush. Suydam is a student of the occult who has acquired some magical ability and whose researches have brought him into company frowned upon by his family, most notably that of the Southern European, Middle Eastern, and East Asian immigrant communities in Red Hook and Five Points. Suydam’s relatives are attempting to have him pronounced mentally incompetent, ostensibly out of concern for his wellbeing, but actually out of concern for their inheritances. In The Ballad of Black Tom, they have hired a pathologically racist private investigator, Ervin Howard (a thinly disguised Robert E. Howard), and used their social influence to secure police assistance in making the case against Suydam. Malone has been assigned to assist Howard in consequence of his well-known interest in the occult. Suydam is, however, completely compos mentis and preparing to initiate a two-stage plan: to first found a cult dedicated to the worship of the Sleeping King and to then enact a ritual to wake the Sleeping King. The Sleeping King is a reference to Cthulhu, the most famous of Lovecraft’s pantheon of Great Old Ones, who was introduced in the short story “The Call of Cthulhu”, which was first published in Weird Tales in February 1928. The Great Old Ones are initially represented as gods who have been imprisoned, but are subsequently revealed to be powerful aliens at rest in either the remote regions of the Earth, other dimensions, or both. Cthulhu lies at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, in the ruins of the sunken city of R’lyeh, a circumstance to which his devotees allude in their chant: ‘“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”’Suydam decides that his recruitment drive will take the form of a party in his mansion and target society’s marginalised, oppressed, and victimised on the basis that they will be more receptive to what amounts to a religious revolution followed by an apocalypse. Suydam recognises Tom’s ability as a conjurer and hires him to assist at the party to which he has invited members of the immigrant communities with which he is already familiar as well as African Americans from Harlem. With Tom’s assistance, Suydam is successful in inaugurating his cult, although he is of course yet another rich white man assuming a leadership role over men and women of various shades of brown. Suydam then sets about the second part of his plan, the waking of the Sleeping King, once again with Tom’s assistance. Malone meets Tom during his surveillance of Suydam, attends Suydam’s hearing, is pleased by his successful defence of his mental competence, and returns to his work on illegal immigration. In the weeks following Suydam’s hearing, his name is mentioned with increasing regularity in Red Hook and Malone suspects that he is involved in either criminal or occult activity, or both. Malone discovers that Suydam has bought three tenement buildings on the seafront and moved in with a gang of fifty hardened criminals, led by an African American known as Black Tom. He does not make the connection with Tommy until later and the racial prejudice he shares with Suydam results in both men underestimating Tom’s mastery of the situation. In pitting Malone (and Howard) against Tom, Lavalle provides an explicit commentary on the racial, social, and political problems that have given rise to the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and its various component organisations, including Black Lives Matter. He also addresses the related but distinct phenomenon of police militarisation in the US directly in spite of his historical setting. Lavalle’s great achievement is that he succeeds in both telling a weird tale and providing overt political commentary without ever straying into the realm of the didactic. This is a difficult bit of authorial magic to pull off because the enjoyment of a tale well told and reflections on contemporary violence typically pull the reader in opposite directions, each distracting from the other. Not so with The Ballad of Black Tom. I shall nonetheless conclude on a note of regret, that the circumstances to which Lavalle draws attention seem to have deteriorated rather than improved since the novella was published.

I feel like the Part 1 was a very nice introduction to it but Part 2 was a little bit overwhelming and confusing. Lots of things happening at the same time not done correctly. However, I totally enjoyed Part 1. Good introduction, bad development and bad ending. 3/5 book. Not good but not bad either. Although I'll still recommend it.

A short, clean and wonderful dark fantasy tale that did not disappoint. It delivered everything it promised and more.The Ballad of Black Tom is a well written account of the life of Thomas Tester and of his journey from beaten black man in an unforgiving city to a god of darkness.Blood, sacrifices and a promise of redemption blend beautifully under LaValle's storytelling exquisite style. The character's arc is short (and shared with another character) but well built nonetheless. The story does leave some unanswered questions, but this is the magic of the book: It lets you wonder, but this doesn't feel like you're missing out on something important. Your own imagination can fill in the gaps.Recommended if you want a beautiful, fast read to wash over the late hours of the night.

Charles Tester ist eigentlich ein Antiheld. Ohne besondere Talente fristet er sein Leben als "African American" anno 1924 in Harlem und verdient sein Geld durch Kurierdienste aller Art. Mehr läßt der krasse Rassismus derzwanziger Jahre nicht zu. Solange er von dem Verdienst seinen arbeitsunfähigen Vater ernähren kann, stört ihn das nicht weiter. Das ändert sich, als er eine mächtige Hexe namens Ma Att wissentlich betrügt und ein gewisser Robert Suydam ihm eine fabelhafte Summe anbietet, wenn er ihm für zwei Abende Gesellschaft leistet. Suydam führt Tester in eine Art Magie ein, die mächtiger ist als jede Hexerei: die Magie der Grossen Alten, zentriert um den Kult des "schlafenden Königs." Nun beginnt der sozial Abgehängte zu erahnen, welche ungenannten Möglichkeiten sich ihm eröffnen-selbst wenn er dafür seine Seele aufgeben muss...Dass Lovecraft und sein "Grauen von Red Hook" hier Pate standen, ist unübersehbar, genau so klar ist aber, dass der Autor-anders als Lovecraft-hier bei den Charakteren in die Tiefe geht und Schwarz/Weiß-Malereien gekonnt umschifft.Wer Spaß an hintergründigem Horror in einer komplexen Form hat, ist mit dieser Novelle bestens bedient!

Le genre de livre qu'on voudrait lire d'une seule traite et qu'on relit avec plaisir plus tard. Il aura parfaitement sa place dans n'importe quelle collection du mythe lovecraftien.