The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

Formats: Print, audio, digital

Publisher: Tor

Genre: Monster, Historic Horror, Occult, Sci-Fi Horror
Audience: Y/A, Adult/Mature

Diversity: Black characters (African American and Caribbean)

Takes Place in: Harlem, New York City

Content Warnings: Bullying, Death, Gore, Mental Illness, Medical Procedures, Oppression, Physical Abuse, Police Harassment, Racism, Torture, Verbal/Emotional Abuse, Violence, Xenophobia (Highlight to view)


Blurb:

People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn't there. Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic, and earns the attention of things best left sleeping. A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?

Oh Lovecraft, you were such a great horror writer, but an absolutely terrible human being.

When it comes to Lovecraft, I have some very complicated opinions. I adore the Cthulhu mythos, cosmic horror, and the concept of forbidden knowledge that utterly destroys your sanity, but it's hard to enjoy his writing when he liberally peppers it with his hatred for anyone who isn't a WASP. One minute  I'm reading an enjoyable little story about a cosmic abomination and the dark secrets humanity was never meant to know, and the next it's morphed into some sort of eugenics bullshit. Here's a small sampling of just some of the bullshit he pulls in his stories: In the Case Of Charles Dexter Ward Lovecraft describes a woman as having "a very repulsive cast of countenance, probably due to a mixture of negro blood," in Herbert West: Reaminator the black boxer, Buck Robinson, is compared to an ape, in The Rats in the Walls there's a black cat named N****r Man, The Horror at Red Hook is basically just Lovecraft rambling about how much he hates immigrants and black people who he refers to as a "contagion" with "primitive half-ape savagery", and in Medusa's Coil he describes slavery as "a civilization and social order now sadly extinct". Oh, and let's not forget that poem. There's a good reason why Lovecraft's bust is no longer used for the World Fantasy Award trophy, the guy was a dick.



I tried to draw Nnedi Okorafor, "tried" being the operative word. She says I got it right from the shoulders up though!

Now, before anyone uses the "Lovecraft was just a product of his time" excuse, please consider this: Yes, his active years as a writer were during the incredibly racist segregation era, but not everyone shared his shitty beliefs about people of color and Jews. Mary White Ovington, Moorfield Storey, and William English Walling were all white, but they were also supporters of  civil rights and racial equality during the same period, and even helped found the NAACP with W. E. B. Du Bois. So it's not like every white person in the 1920s and 1930s was racist. Lovecraft would've at least been aware of civil rights due to Guinn v. United States, a landmark case that found racist literacy tests unconstitutional, the National Negro Business League which helped to double the number of black owned businesses, and prominent black lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston, who was fighting for civil rights in court. Hell, even his friends and family criticized the horror writer's ignorant attitude. Lovecraft's wife, Sonia Greene, and friend Samuel Loveman were both horrified by Lovecraft's anti-Semitism and resented him for it. Sonia even wrote, "Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York, Howard would become livid with rage... He seemed almost to lose his mind." When Lovecraft attacked Charles D. Isaacson's, article on racial tolerance, In a Minor Key, in his own article titled In a Major Key (where he praised the KKK as "that noble but much maligned of Southerners who saved half our country from destruction") he managed to piss off not just Isaacson, but his own friend James Ferdinand Morton, both of whom wrote responses attacking Lovecraft's racism. He knew people thought he was racist, as he'd been called out multiple times and even his wife had pleaded with him to reconsider his beliefs- Lovecraft just chose to be an intolerant jerk.



Probably real Lovecraft titles.

Luckily for us, many talented creators have taken concepts in Lovecraft's writing and used it to create their own works, so fans can still enjoy Yog-Sothoth, the Deep Ones, and the horrors of forbidden knowledge driving men to madness- without all the bigotry. The Ballad of Black Tom is one of these works, a retelling of  Lovecraft's incredibly racist The Horror at Red Hook from the point of view of a black man living in Harlem.

For those not familiar with Lovecraft's original short story, The Horror at Red Hook follows police detective Thomas Malone and his pursuit of forbidden knowledge in the immigrant neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn, or as Lovecraft describes it "a maze of hybrid squalor". Because the only religions in Lovecraft's world are either good, Anglo-Saxon Christianity or evil, bad, demon worship, all the brown people are apparently involved with the occult.  Malone is put on a case involving the wealthy and eccentric recluse, Robert Suydam because his relatives want the old man declared mentally unfit so they can have his money. During the course of the investigation Malone discovers that Suydam has been spending time with illegal immigrants and foreigners, which obviously means he's doing something super evil, like sacrificing white babies to tentacle-faced monsters, because Lovecraft is racist and Malone is an awful detective. Suydam continues to do suspicious things, in Malone's opinion anyway, like lose weight, work on his personal grooming, and get married. Eventually the whole thing cumulates in a police raid in Redhook, where Malone finds a bunch of creepy shit in Suydam's basement flat which causes the police detective to lose his sanity points and pass out from sheer terror. Afterwards we discover that the buildings collapsed, killing almost everyone except Malone, who is left with PTSD and batophobia. The rest of the story is just Lovecraft whining about immigrants "ruining" New York and reads like the antiquated 8,000 word equivalent of a Trump tweet. It's not one of his better stories. So it's kind of a miracle that LaValle not only manages to write a version of The Horror at Red Hook that's not just a commentary on racism, but is actually good, while still keeping all the creepiness, mind-fuckery, characters, and plot of the original. Suydam and Thomas Malone both appear as major characters in The Ballad of Black Tom, Malone serving as a deuteragonist for the second half of the story, while Suydam introduces Tommy Tester, the book's protagonist, to the occult. There are other hidden references to Lovecraft lore throughout the book. The title, Black Tom, is an allusion to the cat from The Rats in the Walls whose name was changed from N***** Man to Black Tom when the story was reprinted in Zest magazine in the 1950s. Toward the end Robert LaValle mentions a man from Rhode Island, living in New York, who may be Lovecraft himself.

LaValle defends the minority population living in Harlem and Redhook that Lovecraft so despised by showing them as the every day folks they are, trying to get by with what little they have. Tommy even expresses disappointment after visiting the Victoria Club, when he learns that it's not the den of debauchery and sin he had hoped for, but instead old men playing cards and women selling meals they've made at home. There are criminals, yes, but that's to be expected in any impoverished area, and they're far from a majority of the population. When Tommy discovers Suydam is associating with so many criminals, he's terrified, and it speaks more to the rich, white man's character than the immigrants on New York. What Malone discovers in the basement is also been changed from the original, but to reveal more would ruin the amazing ending of Black Tom. Let's just say LaValle provides his readers with more detail on the horrors the detective discovers, and a much more satisfying ending.

The thing I found the scariest about The Ballad of Black Tom weren't the fictional monstrosities sleeping at the bottom of the see ready to destroy humanity, it was how much LaValle's fictionalized world reminded me of our own. The cops' blatant racism, their harassment of black men who were simply walking down the street, and their willingness to kill at the slightest provocation felt all too familiar, as did the rampant xenophobia and anti-immigration attitudes. The story may be set in the 1920s, but it's clear that some things still haven't changed. Tommy's encounters with the police were enough to give me panic attacks, as I remembered my own family's terrifying encounters with cops. While I'm pale enough to pass as white, most of my extended family isn't, and I grew up with horror stories about what happened to black people stalked, shot, raped, and lynched for merely existing. Tommy has learned what every young black person is still being taught: if the police stop you, appear as non-aggressive as possible, be polite, and put up with whatever harassment the cops dish out or you'll wind up dead. We see this in all his encounters with Malone. Tommy plays dumb, looks downs, and lets them steal his money and insult him to his face without making a comment. At least for the first half of the book.

Tommy Tester starts the story as a good man. He may trick others and take on some not-so-legal work, but he's trying to take care of his disabled father in a world that's against him, so it's not surprising he has to do some questionable things to survive. At least he never actively hurts others and tries to do the right thing when he can, like preventing a witch from getting her hands on forbidden knowledge, which is more than I can say for most of the people Tommy encounters. Racist cops constantly threaten and abuse him, he's harassed by a bunch of white kids just for walking while black, and white society treats him as less than human. Even Robert Suydam, who claims to admire Tommy and gives him a large sum of money to play guitar in his home, is merely using for his own ends. As it turns out, Suydam is a white man who fetishizes POC cultures, while still viewing himself as superior to the same people he claims he wants to help. There's a saying "you can only kick a dog so many times before it bites back" and after being attacked, abused, taunted, stolen from, threatened, and finally losing everything to cold and corrupt law enforcement, Tommy Tester realizes he has nothing left to lose and says "fuck it". And that's how we start the second half of the story, told from Malone's point of view, with Tommy, now calling himself "Black Tom," transforming himself into the most badass, brutal, and terrifying antagonist in order to exact his bloody revenge on Robert Suydam, Thomas Malone, and the xenophobic NYPD. And let me just say, it's immensely satisfying. Gory, but satisfying.

I abhor violence in real life, and obviously don't agree with mass slaughter and abuse, no matter how evil the victims are. The real world is more complicated than just good vs. evil, and violence and revenge just beget more of the same. That said, there's still a violent, pissed off part of me, hurt and furious at the injustice of the world, that wants to see wicked people suffer. Not just get their richly deserved comeuppance, but really, truly suffer in the worst ways imaginable. It's the bitter part of me that relates to all those Saturday morning cartoon villains of my past who just want to destroy everything, because the world is such a terrible, hateful place that it probably deserves it. This vengeful part of me that becomes more and more hateful every time I read the news was immensely satisfied and soothed to watch Black Tom punish a group of racists who resemble 21st century hate groups a little too closely. It's the same anger that motivates Killmonger in the Black Panther film.

But, like I said, these are ugly thoughts I would never actually act on or hope to see happen in real life because I know how wrong they are, and I still hold on to the hope that logic and compassion will win out (so FBI, if you're reading this, I just want to clarify, I'm not actually planning on going on any kind of bloody killing spree). When Tommy, pushed to choose between an eldritch abomination and the hateful people who hurt him again and again, he gives in to revenge and loses part of his humanity, and that's what makes the story so bitter-sweet. Black Tom may have gotten his revenge, but at the cost of being a good man, something he will have to live with for the rest of his life. He's compromised his most important value, being the kind of man his father would be proud of, and can no longer look his best friend in the eye. As satisfying as it is to see horrible people suffer a horrible fate, you can't help but feel bad for Tommy who's left to wonder if it was really worth it. 


The severed human leg actually has nothing to do with why the Feds are here. Though I'm sure my wife is going to ask about that too. Watch what you say on the internet kids!