What I Am Reading: "The Changeling" by Victor LaValle

I spend October reading horror novels in celebration of the season, but I also try to read some horror around the Halloween antipode as well. I missed it by a couple of months this year; but a friend and I picked this book off a shortlist we cobbled together. As a horror novel by a black man, partially about race, it ties in to the current moment, as our country has seen a surge of police violence in response to protests of the murder by police of yet another black man, George Floyd. As a personal note for the blog, the current zeitgeist brings yet another reminder that I do not read enough books by black authors or about black subjects, so I am going to try to do better about that in my future book pile. To anyone interested in other horror novels about race in America, though, I can strongly recommend Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff, or White Tears by Hari Kunzru. Or Beloved, of course.

One of last year's horror Halloween antipode novels was about a changeling as well. In folklore, a changeling is a problematic "child" left behind in a human household when fairies sneak off with their actual baby. Last year's novel by Matt Wesolowski gave the British version, but LaValle's version mixes and matches a bit, in order to bring some surprises.

The novel's theme is fatherhood, and main character Apollo Kagwa both is a father and is shaped by his own experiences of his father. His father was a white man who walked out on his mother, a Ugandan refugee to New York. Apollo is plagued by a recurring dream of his father arriving at their apartment while water is running and steam is swirling, to "take him away." As he grows up, he reads heavily, but from a young age resells the cheap paperbacks and magazines that his mother provides him with. This turns into a career as a book-dealer, which leads him eventually to meet his wife, Emma, a librarian. After a dramatic birth on the A train, they are the proud parents of baby Brian, named after Apollo's own absentee father.

However, not all is right, as Emma comes to believe that the child is not their child. Seen mostly from Brian's perspective or that of other characters who aren't Emma, the reader comes to think that she is losing her shit. After a series of fights, she snaps, restrains Apollo, and kills the baby with scalding water.

Time jumps a bit here: Apollo spends a couple of months at Rikers for taking Emma's coworkers hostage in an attempt to learn more about her act. Emma vanishes. Apollo is offered help finding her from a strange source: he and his tech-savvy friend Patrice, the only other black book-dealer in town, manage to sell their last purchase, a rare signed edition of To Kill a Mockingbird. The buyer, seemingly a nerdy divorced man, offers the help of an internet hive-mind to find Emma. Apollo, wanting only revenge, uses this information to track her to North Brother Island in the East River, formerly the home of a sanitarium and successor institutions, now abandoned (and the site of some urban exploration narratives I've read).

Here, the story really kicks in. The nerd, William Wheeler, is more than he seems, and he has led them to capture at the hands of a strange group of witches that Emma had been in contact with. Wheeler calls upon powerful forces to attack, and the witches flee in one direction, and Apollo in another. From here, he enlists Patrice to search further, and one grave-robbery later they end up believing Emma is in the only forest in Queens.

As it turns out, Emma and these other women are the mothers of children who have been replaced by changelings. These changelings are not the work of fairies, but are in fact Norwegian in origin; and the stolen children are given to a troll as tribute for the magic that kept a Norwegian family safe and enriched them. This is the Scandinavian version of the changeling folk tale. This is another place where fatherhood comes into play, as Wheeler (not his real name) was dissatisfied with his father's stewardship of the family legacy. His father, Jorgen Knudsen, may speak of his family's storied magic, enmeshment in the young United States, and arrival on the "Norwegian Mayflower," the Restoration, in 1825. He thinks his tech-savvy son has been passed over for opportunity because of, basically, affirmative action and a changing country. But the son, known only by pseudonyms in the book, thinks his father hasn't been aggressive enough in procuring sacrifices for the troll to enrich them, so has created his own dark web racket where trolls of the other kind can watch the families he intends to steal children from, and the fate of those children. A few troll-fights and bloody revenges later, and Apollo, Emma, and Brian live happily ever after, in the type of fairy tale ending that is disparaged by several characters throughout the book.

Apollo faces off with several types of racism in the book: the familiar kind where he must beware of police while in white neighborhoods on various pursuits, and make sure not to say the wrong thing when confronted by them. Supernaturally he deals with a white threat, the Norwegian family (and honestly who is whiter than Scandanavians?) that otherizes him, and has spent multiple American generations feeding otherized children into the system, in this case troll magic-based, that brought them their security and prosperity. Fatherhood as noted continuously comes up, and Apollo must eventually reckon with the fact that he did not have faith in his wife when she had correctly identified the changeling problem. This is an interesting journey for the reader as well, as at the beginning we do not understand Emma's violent and extreme reaction. The novel has other, less grim, literary elements, such as the motif of Greek names, from Apollo and his mantra of "I am the god Apollo" in the face of adversity, to Callisto, “Cal,” the leader of the seeming witch coven (which I had hoped to learn more about later, but is gone from the novel once its role is played). For the most part, the plot unspools for us as we read it, and we have to make inferences after the fact.