The Ballad Of Black Tom (2016) by Victor LaValle

The Ballad Of Black Tom (2016) by Victor LaValle: There's an ongoing battle in horror circles over just how much emphasis should be placed on H.P. Lovecraft's well-documented racism. 

It's well-documented mainly because he documented it himself in his thousands upon thousands of letters. The Ballad Of Black Tom arrived in 2016 as the argument began to pick up steam among HPL's supporters and detractors and all those caught in-between.

Victor LaValle has written a very good novella here, perhaps somewhat overpraised because it's a revisionist Cthulhu Mythos work by an African-American writer. Perhaps somewhat overdamned from the other side, too. It's pretty good. It's not the blistering, lacerating work of greatness I expected from some reviews nor the unmitigated cock-up I feared from other reviews.

LaValle retells Lovecraft's early 1920's New York-set story "The Horror At Red Hook" while adding one major new character to it, our protagonist, dubbed Black Tom once he sets certain supernatural events into motion but born and raised Thomas Tester. LaValle portrays the plight of African-Americans in 1920's New York with a clinical matter-of-factness that turns to passionate horror as non-supernatural horrors push Thomas into the role of Black Tom in order to gain both personal and racial vengeance on the white power structure.

Do you need to be familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos to fully enjoy the story? Oh, probably. The cosmic horror of the story is almost entirely a matter of this prior knowledge. The more visceral horrors, supernatural and natural, are described; the cosmic are told too much and not shown in particularly horrifying terms. 

This may be intentional -- LaValle foregrounds the horrors of racism here, in part by pushing the cosmic to the background. It does mute the ending, however, which seems as if it's supposed to cause some final culmination of horror and instead seems pretty obvious and frankly just a bit lame.

Obviously, the major revision to "The Horror At Red Hook" is the addition of a whole new character to it, right? Well, maybe not. For one, "The Horror At Red Hook" never specifically refers to anything in the then-amorphous Cthulhu Mythos. It isn't a Mythos tale. The Ballad of Black Tom is a Mythos tale, chosen by LaValle, I assume, because it's HPL's most racist, non-ghost-written major story*, obsessively detailing how New York went to Hell when all those swarthy foreigners arrived. And Italians! HPL had it in for the Italians.

LaValle drastically recasts the conclusion of "The Horror At Red Hook." He pretty much has to, as a brief foray through a magical doorway grants Thomas magical superpowers that allow him to do anything the plot requires. Is this a Mary Sue moment? Oh, probably. Adding a bit more nuance to Thomas' powers and abilities would ground the work more. As is, it all seems a bit fanboyish. Actually, very fanboyish, which I'm pretty sure is not what LaValle was aiming for.

Still and all, this is a worthy addition to the Cthulhu Mythos, which has been criticizing and self-evaluating itself for decades in the works of its finest writers. The text even manages to get subverted by an attempt at subversion and criticism. LaValle alters Malone's physical appearance from HPL's source text so as to make him resemble HPL himself. He also introduces a horrifyingly racist character who's clearly a parody of HPL pen pal and Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard (the first clue is that the character is named Mr. Howard; the second is that he's from Texas). 

But HPL and his pen-friends were introducing characters based on one another in their Mythos work from the late 1920's onwards, generally to kill them off in horrible ways. The fates of Howard and Malone seem somewhat tame compared to how, say, HPL killed off his version of Robert Bloch (in "The Haunter Of the Dark"), how Bloch killed off HPL (in "The Shambler From the Stars"), how Frank Belknap Long killed off HPL (in "The Space-Eaters"), and so on, and so forth. Basically, as friends, Lovecraft and his circle were way better at killing one another off than LaValle is at killing them off. Oh, well. Recommended.

* "Medusa's Coil" is HPL's most racist story. It's a heavily ghost-rewritten version of Zealia Bishop's story.