🎃 What I Am Reading for Halloween: "The Ballad of Black Tom" by Victor LaValle

I am a big fan of the antiracist reimagining of Lovecraft stories, as exemplified in this book and in Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff, among other recent works. I will spare you a long commentary on how much I like Lovecraft, but it is sufficient to say only that I am fairly familiar with a lot of the secondary and scholarly literature on him and his works; and that I've rationed out his stories, as I do with a few other writers, so that I am still able to read new ones for a long time. Even so, I am very aware of the bigotry expressed by Lovecraft in his life and in many of his works. Some people have not acknowledged that Lovecraft is a racist; but others have not only acknowledged it, but are working on the next steps.

One of the stories I have rationed is "The Horror at Red Hook;" partially because it suffers acutely from the Lovecraftian taint of racism. It was written during his time in New York, when he was the most misanthropic, racist, and xenophobic; and is a story about a cult that apparently predates the Cthulhu Mythos stories. That is the story that this novel is based on.

Victor LaValle apparently feels the same way about HLP that I do, he dedicates this book to "H.P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings." He seems to feel, as have other writers commenting on the new Lovecraft Country TV show, that Lovecraft's work is suited for reimagining and not for oblivion. Lovecraft is very important to the horror genre, not merely for his mythos and writing style that have been the subject of cookie-cutter adaptation and pastiche, but for his place in moving beyond gothic tropes to cosmic horror that reckons with humanity's insignificant place in a materialistic universe. While his fear of the alien and the other was too often invoked in the form of non-white people, their presence in his works is a clear wedge in the door to turn the story on its head, as this short novel does (I myself am waiting for the day that the Cthulhu cult itself is fully reclaimed as a cross-cultural revolutionary organization in some work).

This work does something along those lines, though following only an individual protagonist. The book is short, and written in a straightforward, earnest way - the exposition comes almost too eagerly, with a character's backstory explained as soon as they appear. Basically: Tom, a Black hustler who uses cover as a musician to perform arcane odd jobs, withholds part of a powerful artifact from a client, and retribution comes in the unstoppable form of police violence. After the murder of his father, he essentially causes police officer Malone, Lovecraft's original character in the "Red Hook" story, to lose a game of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, and fail to stop a wizened cult leader from opening a portal and awakening Cthulhu (or "The Sleeping King," as he is called in almost all of the book).

The book is itself a pastiche, with an appearance by Lovecraft himself in some of the exposition; and the actual killing of Tom's father committed by Ervin Howard, a private detective from Texas and an obvious invocation of Robert Ervin Howard, Lovecraft's correspondent and fellow pulp author of less-redeemable stories. Someone unfamiliar with the original work it is meant to reference might enjoy it as a fairly simple tale about magic ending the world, or they might be baffled. I found it to be, other than a competent execution of the Lovecraft feel, an important step along the path of taking what is good in horror literature and making it more inclusive. I might not recommend original Lovecraft stories to everyone, but I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this book, as a descendent, as a reasonable introduction.