I haven’t read The Horror at Red Hook but I’m very familiar with Lovecraftian tropes and I’m fully aware of what a racist bigot H.P. Lovecraft was.

So... this book gave me particular pleasure knowing that Lovecraft would have HATED it.

This is a novel of the Black Lives Matter movement set in a Lovecraftian Cthulhu horror world and it fucking works. I mean it really works. It’s a mythical, enigmatic, eldritch tale told from the perspective of a black man in the 20s where every injustice he faces is acknowledged and he is the hero.

I don’t want to say too much more because I’ll spoil it, but I really loved this story. And I loved imagining that bigot Lovecraft’s face upon reading his imagined world imagined in this way.

I fully recognise Lovecraft’s influence on the horror genre, but I believe that we have advanced far beyond him and his unconscionable views.

We are in a time of reckoning right now over how to separate problematic artists from the valuable art they have made, and The Ballad of Black Tom is one of the better examples of using transformation to rehab a problematic work into something informative and worthwhile and not shitty.

Cthulhu is an important part of the horror canon, but Lovecraft doesn’t have to be.