The Ballad of Black Tom

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The author, Victor Lavalle, has taken H.P. Lovecraft's story, The Horror at Red Hook, and written a sort of backstory into and through it. This approach actually works well and has the added virtue of giving a kind of slice of life of Harlem and Brooklyn in the 1920s.

After reading a few pages of this novella, I set it aside to read Lovecraft's original. I was not impressed by it. The Horror at Red Hook is well-known, at least I've heard it mentioned in various lectures. I found it to be an overwrought, confusing, undisciplined piece of prose. Presumably, it is noteworthy for displaying Lovecraft's racial prejudices, but, honestly, one could easily overlook the occasional comments about middle-eastern Yazidis without affecting the story. (Also, Lovecraft apparently thought that people living in Iraq looked like the Chinese.)

Lavalle has taken the basic outline of the Lovecraft story, omitted some elements of the story and written the story around the character of Charles Thomas Tester, an African-American conman/street musician. Tester is the “Black Tom” of the title. Initially, Tom is involved in a bit of the “weird,” as part of which he meets Detective Malone and Robert Suydam, who are both characters from “The Horror at Red Hook.” Lavalle also adds in a corrupt, vicious, racist detective named Howard, whom I think may be modeled on Lovecraft's friend Robert Howard. One thing leads to another and Tom becomes the central character of the events of “The Horror at Red Hook.” Tom starts out sympathetic, becomes vengeful in response to racism, and seems to become sympathetic at the end, albeit he has unleashed Cthulhu in some way.

Lavalle's story does not map onto the Lovecraft original. The Tom character is not mentioned in the story, neither is the injury inflicted on Malone. In fact, it is hard to harmonize the two stories.

Nonetheless, this story was well-written and I enjoyed the tone and the sense of a historical place.