The Ballad of Black Tom

"This is a wonderful novella, which is a response to one of H. P. Lovecraft’s most egregious stories, The Horror at Red Hook . It’s one of his New York City stories, and it’s just hideously racist, in ways that are very hard to rationalise or equivocate about – it’s these evil foreigners and dark people and so on who are going to bring the monsters back. Victor tackles that story head-on, and writes a kind of a complement to it, in which a young man is given a mission that brings him into contact with the other side of elements in the original story. The heroic law enforcement officers in the Lovecraft story become much more corrupt and sinister figures, and the evil cultists, while still evil cultists, seem no worse than the forces of systematic racism and oppression that are at work through the law enforcement and political apparatus of New York City in the 1920s. It’s a story that manages to remain true in some ways to Lovecraft’s vision in terms of the summoning of the Eldritch Horror, but does it in a way that is honestly heartbreaking. It’s an amazing achievement, and in a hundred or so pages. No. I had not read The Horror at Red Hook before I read The Ballad of Black Tom. Once you do read Red Hook , you see, ‘Oh, right, I get what he’s doing.’ But you don’t have to have read it to get a lot out of The Ballad of Black Tom."