THE BALLAD OF BLACK TOM: BOOK REVIEW

What makes an effective retelling? Depending on your medium, audience, and intentions, the answer can vary immensely. If you’re transforming a fairytale into a young adult novel, like genre mainstay Marissa Meyer or up-and-comer Kalynn Bayron, you’ll want to take ample liberties to spice up a story that everyone knows. If you’re adapting a well-loved book into a film, like Twilight’s Catherine Hardwicke or Lord of the Rings’ Peter Jackson, you’ll want to stick closely to the source material to please die-hard book-lovers and avoid harsh fandom critiques. For musicals (Cats 2019), medieval poetry (The Green Knight 2021), and superhero comics (Marvel’s entire blockbuster filmography), the lines of what makes a “good” retelling feel much fuzzier – but audience preferences are always in debate.

But, especially outside the realm of film, there comes certain times where retelling has less to do with creative preferences and more with creative necessity. Sometimes a story needs repairing or a conversation needs to begin. Sometimes a commentary requires an artistic medium. Sometimes an adaptation is less a retelling than a reckoning — and this is surely the case with Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (2016).

I encountered this text just two weeks ago as part of a college seminar, but I can tell that it will stick with me for a while. I’m not alone in that. The Tor.com Lovecraftian novella garnered positive attention from weird fiction fans and critics alike upon release, and readers continue to discuss it in online forums, pop culture journals, and, evidently, college curricula six years later. Ballad followed LaValle’s first four novels; it achieved over half a dozen awards and designations, most notably earning finalist for the 2016 Hugo and Nebula Awards and winning the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for psychological horror. Fans flocked to the novella for a sharp, 1920s retelling of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror of Red Hook” (1927) from a Black perspective; critics focused, and still focus, on its revolutionary work grappling with the flaws of weird fiction and progressing the genre into a new literary age. I share the fascinations of both sides, and I’m also interested in what the novella could represent regarding the future of literary adaptations and the conversations they can carry.

The Ballad of Black Tom follows Charles Thomas Tester, a 20-year-old hustler and amateur musician, as life pulls him into the realistic horrors of police brutality in 1920s Harlem and the cosmic ones of inscrutable alphabets, sinister gods, and a Cthulhu-worshipping cult. After losing his father, Tommy falls in with Robert Suydam and the cultists of Red Hook as they plot to awaken the sleeping god. He finds greater power than he ever expected, but it comes at the cost of his soul and of the world he knows.

The most notable part of the Ballad reading experience, at least if you’re familiar with Lovecraft’s works, is its interaction with “The Horror of Red Hook.” Lovecraft’s story serves as source material to a certain extent, but only as far as a general plot outline and common supporting characters. As compared to Lovecraft’s more foundational works of weird fiction, LaValle appears to have chosen this one because of its flagrant and prominent racism. Any of Lovecraft’s tales could serve as subjects for critique in this vein, but “Red Hook” feels particularly virulent. It fails to center its mystery around an innovative monster and the people who worship it, as more renowned stories including “Call of Cthulhu” (1928) do. Instead, it features a villainous conglomerate of immigrants and people of color who weaponize a generic assortment of ghouls against a heroic police detective. Here, Lovecraft’s famous racism overtakes the story, to such an extent that the text fails to add any value to weird fiction or iconography to the Lovecraftian pantheon. This makes it a strong starting place for LaValle’s subversion, though it also challenges him to make the book “Lovecraftian” in the mode of iconic imagery. (As I noted above, LaValle replaces the assortment of Halloween monsters with an obvious choice: Cthulhu, the squid-faced granddaddy of all weird fiction monsters. He also inserts some cosmic lore from non-Lovecraftian sources, including the Egyptian goddess of truth Maat and an adaptation of the universe-governing Supreme Alphabet from Black nationalist group the Five-Percent Nation.)

LaValle challenges the “Red Hook” racism in some obvious and some not-so-obvious ways. He kicks the perspective to a young Black man who faces police violence instead of the story’s original white detective, at least until the novella’s third act. He demonstrates the harsh segregation of 1920s New York and the difficulties that people of color faced, from finding good work to surviving cross-city travel. Rather than portraying his protagonist simply as a victim misaligned by the system, he allows Tommy to explore regions of the morally gray with his cosmically-empowered and revenge-seeking alter ego, Black Tom. LaValle explores the intersections and differences between the indiscriminate, indifferent horror of the Great Old Ones and the discriminant racism of the NYPD. He constantly asks a central question: what makes a monster? 

The answer is not obvious; although LaValle presents a specifically anti-racist point of view, he allows corruption and moral ambiguity to every single character. He even maintains Thomas Malone, “Red Hook’s” original protagonist, as a point of view character in the final act. Although Malone is despicably indifferent to the plight of Black New Yorkers, he suffers as Black Tom’s torture victim and deals with the resultant trauma within the novella. The thesis LaValle reaches, if it’s possible to extract just one, is that evil rests somewhere in the murky intersection of action and intention that all humans operate upon.

Ballad undeniably critiques Lovecraft’s racism and makes a point to expand beyond the black-and-white moral framework of “Red Hook.” Regardless, it pays devoted homage to Lovecraft’s works and weird fiction. It’s a book for genre fans more than critics or outsiders; its references run deep, including verbatim phrases from Lovecraft stories, hints at creatures and places from the mythos, and even a cameo of H.P. himself. Beyond Lovecraft, Ballad examines the appeal of all cosmic horror. It takes particular interest in the breakdown of morality as it exists with a human framework, and it commentates on the relief of nonspecific existential threats, rather than targeted ones, to marginalized communities. Like any good work of weird fiction, it explores the emotions at the meeting place of the human and the inhuman, the understood and the incomprehensible. It’s a reimagining that addresses the flaws of the original, but in many respects, it is also a love letter.

I’d recommend this book to lovers of morally gray protagonists and weird fiction enthusiasts who struggle with the problematic origins of the genre. It’s a quick, tense read; I got through it in less than two hours, and those were two hours well spent. If you want something engaging, thought-provoking, and a little bit out of this world, The Ballad of Black Tom is a must-read for the modern science fiction fan.