The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle [Horror Book Review]
O! what a miserable night I passed! the cold stars shone in mockery, and the bare trees waved their branches above me: now and then the sweet voice of a bird burst forth amidst the universal stillness. All, save I, were at rest or in enjoyment: I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me; and, finding myself unsympathised with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin. -Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom is a Jazz Age Lovecraftian novel about a guitar case-carrying man named Charles Thomas Tester who hustles to support himself and his father. Tom lives in Harlem, New York (Lovecraft very infamously loathed his time in New York) and he gives magical items to people willing to pay, such as a spellbook he disempowers and gives to an old witch. Things take a turn for the weird when he meets a man named Robert Suydam who invites Tom to play at a party.
The story very much recalls many aspects of Lovecraft's maligned anti-immigrant short story "The Horror at Red Hook," including the characters of Thomas Malone and Robert Suydam, but telling the story from a black man's perspective. This is no easy feat, taking a poorly received story and re-crafting it, but LaValle pulls it off magnificently. Exploring both Lovecraft and racism in the same space is an ambitious and oftentimes fraught endeavor, given Lovecraft's incredibly virulent hatred of everyone who wasn't a white person of pure English heritage. (Even though Lovecraft himself was American, but it was okay, he thought, because his heritage was 100% English--except it wasn't because he also had [gasp] Welsh and Irish in him.)
I enjoyed LaValle's The Devil in Silver, so I definitely knew, as someone who considers Lovecraft their favorite author, I had to check out a Lovecraftian story from him, especially one that deconstructs the vitriolic overtones found in "The Horror" and other Lovecraft works. LaValle's prose is elegant and accessible, and Tom is immediately relatable; his mannerisms and worries make sense, and how he interacts with the world is organic.
Given the story's short length, I wasn't completely sold on the POV shift halfway through the book. I do understand the reasoning and the commentary that comes from Malone's patronizing "sensitivity"; still, I wanted to spend more time with Tom. I was completely compelled by his struggle. His change in the climax is intriguing, and it was a great move to essentially take a person villainized by Lovecraft's narratives and show his sympathetic struggle and how he was ultimately hurt by circumstances, much like the Old Gods, out of his control. LaValle takes the people Lovecraft made monsters through repulsive descriptions and allegory and shows, through Tom, their desperation. In a way, much like sympathetic readings of Paradise Lost, you almost kinda want the "good guys" who aren't that good to die and for Cthulhu to recreate the world. You know, just a little.
Overall, The Ballad of Black Tom is a wonderful neo-Lovecraftian novel, and I'd love to see more stories that explore Lovecraft and society in similar ways.
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