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.

NEONOMICON: written by Alan Moore with Antony Johnston; illustrated by Jacen Burroughs

Neonomicon: written by Alan Moore with Antony Johnston; illustrated by Jacen Burroughs (2003, 2010-2011): Winner of the first-ever Bram Stoker Award for a Graphic Novel (from the Horror Writers' Association), Neonomicon is Alan Moore's dark valentine to the life and work of H.P. Lovecraft. 'Neonomicon' is a play on the title of Lovecraft's famous, imaginary volume of terrible knowledge, the Necronomicon.

All the sexual horrors that were vaguely implied in many of Lovecraft's stories are here made manifest, often in graphically disturbing fashion, all of them delineated in a razor-sharp quasi-realistic mode by Jacen Burroughs. It's a spectacular, and spectacularly disturbing, graphic novel that rewards multiple re-readings.

Burroughs's art complements the story beautifully, giving us a Cthulhu Mythos story with both the suggestiveness and the painful exactness necessary to certain sections. The relatively realistic nature of Burroughs's art may be seen as the equivalent of the faux-documentary stretches of many of Lovecraft's finest works, in which an accumulation of 'real' detail from interviews and newspaper articles served the construction of that awful Cthulhuian world.

This collected volume actually contains both the miniseries named Neonomicon and the earlier, shorter set-up, The Courtyard. On a slightly different alternate Earth where the major cities are domed so as to cut down on pollution and the telephones contain fax machines (!), three FBI agents at two different times try to seek out the origins of a strange rise in mass killings by people who seem totally unrelated.

While there are cloachal horrors and sexual horrors awaiting, there are also gratifyingly disturbing moments of weirdness that evoke the sort of cosmic horror Lovecraft strove for throughout his work, a breaking-down of existential categories, a collapse in causality. Moore's humour also plays out, sometimes in perfect harmony with the horror (as one cop says about a disturbing bit of graffitti/art, "I hope that's a tree." It isn't.).

The personal problems of the characters tie directly into the ideas Moore explores in the course of this dark odyssey: The Courtyard's protagonist is a hard-core racist, and his story plays out in the Red Hook district of New York, setting for Lovecraft's early, racist fear-of-miscegenation story, "The Horror at Red Hook." Neonomicon's protagonist is a female FBI agent whose career and personal problems with institutional sexism and exploitation will ultimately play a terrible role in the story's resolution. Lovecraft's stories didn't have female protagonists, and generally didn't have female characters with speaking roles.

This isn't a volume for everyone: it's vicious and boundary-pushing. But it's also an astonishing addition to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Highly recommended.