Paperback, 149 pages
English language
Published Feb. 16, 2016 by Tor.com.
”The Ballad of Black Tom” — the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Award finalist and Shirley Jackson and British Fantasy Award-winning excavation of Lovecraftian mythos by Victor LaValle—is given new life in a brand-new hardcover edition.
“Full of rage and passion.”—The New York Times
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 …
”The Ballad of Black Tom” — the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Award finalist and Shirley Jackson and British Fantasy Award-winning excavation of Lovecraftian mythos by Victor LaValle—is given new life in a brand-new hardcover edition.
“Full of rage and passion.”—The New York Times
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?
I really wish I had read this in October. It's a heady mix of Lovecraftian horror and racial oppression in 1924 NYC. It's a quick read but I was sad when it was over.
Pretty great! It ended up being a little shorter than I expected, but also, I whipped through this in about four days of reading. Solid Lovecraftian fun.
A retelling of HP Lovecraft's The Horror at Red Hook, but from the POV of Black Tom. Takes the racist story from the notoriously racist Lovecraft and puts the power of The Great Old Ones in the hands of a Black man who suffered from society. Black Tom is set entirely in Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos where the original story predated Cthulhu and was spottily tied to the mythos at best.
Overall, The Ballad of Black Tom was brilliant and amazing. HIGHLY recommended for anyone, but especially for those who like/prefer cosmic horror. I don't know what took me so long to read this book, but I'm glad it was required reading for my The Haunted Library lit class at Emerson.
I'll take Cthulhu over you devils any day.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a single thing by Lovecraft, but I am vaguely familiar with his version of a weird story. I’m assuming this is even better if you’ve read the relevant short story, but I still enjoyed this.
Despite this being a novella, I found myself moved multiple times by the story. Shocked by the events of the story, too. The imagery of Black Tom with a bloody guitar was perfection.
THE BALLAD OF BLACK TOM is a Lovecraftian retelling which transforms the original story from a litany of racism to a story of a 1920's Brooklyn Black man's existence in that racist miasma, and bloody revenge after a murder by the police.
The world-building dances a delicate line of conveying the racism of the 1920's while using only as much explicit racism as is needed to show the attitudes of the various characters. There's a scene which is all the more stark and impactful for using phrases still wielded today against Black people who have been murdered by police. I don't know if those exact phrases are anachronist or not, but if they are then the "authentic" 1920's version would involve a lot more slurs, and I have no quibbles with the author's choice of language here.
I love the first half where Tom is narrator, and at the end …
An exceptional take on and addition for the Cthulhu mythos, of which I've read not an insignificant amount of stories, though unfortunately The Horror at Red Hook is not one of those as far as I remember (I did read them a while ago). Regardless, I was at least clued into the mythos enough to recognize how this story ties into it, and also familiar enough with Lovecraft's racism to appreciate the way the author expresses his criticality of it throughout the novella, starting with the switched PoV. Structurally, I thought it was a bit of a slow burn at the beginning, but once it gets going it doesn't take its foot off the accelerator, and this being a novella, a slow beginning isn't a huge deterrent to my enjoyment anyway. I was also very satisfied with it as a horror story, the imagery it conjures is very effective and …
An exceptional take on and addition for the Cthulhu mythos, of which I've read not an insignificant amount of stories, though unfortunately The Horror at Red Hook is not one of those as far as I remember (I did read them a while ago). Regardless, I was at least clued into the mythos enough to recognize how this story ties into it, and also familiar enough with Lovecraft's racism to appreciate the way the author expresses his criticality of it throughout the novella, starting with the switched PoV. Structurally, I thought it was a bit of a slow burn at the beginning, but once it gets going it doesn't take its foot off the accelerator, and this being a novella, a slow beginning isn't a huge deterrent to my enjoyment anyway. I was also very satisfied with it as a horror story, the imagery it conjures is very effective and genuinely unsettling, it knows to center and let the focus linger on the magical and supernatural rather than the few gruesome depictions that are good for shock effect but it quickly moves away from. A great read!
