This is a book that doesn’t shy away from showing horror and monstrosity. It is horrific, but it is also weighted down with what we know has come before it. Tom has become monstrous and because we have switched from his perspective we see this horror in a completely different way. Malone is the one who the reader is with when we see what has become of Tom.
The book then pivots and places its perspective with the detective Malone.
Instead it is LaValle’s choice to slowly build up our empathy for Tom throughout the first half of the book so that when something terrible happens near the end of his section, we too feel that rage and grief that he does. However, it is not only this twisting of the Lovecraftian narrative which makes this such an astonishing work. Police violence is a central component of the novel and the language surrounding it is as horrific as it should be in its repetition of phrases we’ve all heard on the news too many times: “I felt in danger for my life. This, of course, is an aspect of the book that seems even more prescient this year. Tom’s story, though, is one imbued with the horror of history and specifically the racism that hangs over so much of his life. Tom may be a bit of a con man and a hustler but he is also a decent, good-hearted person, and the thing he cares most about in the world is his father. LaValle upends this by beginning from the perspective of Tom. These two characters also appear in HP Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook,” now known as much for its usual Lovecraftian cosmic horror as it is for its extreme racism and xenophobia. Because of this, he ends up coming in to contact with Robert Suydam-a man bent on bringing forth terrible ancient gods into the world. The novella follows Charles Thomas Tester (the “Tom” of the title), a young hustler, living with his kind and beloved father. Beyond that question, though, he also examines a reader’s empathy through his use of a mid-book perspective shift. In his novella The Ballad of Black Tom, reimagining characters from the weird fiction universe of HP Lovecraft, Victor LaValle answers that question. Police Brutality via Eric Drooker (c) What forces turn someone who is, for the most part, fundamentally good into something possibly evil? This question lies at the heart of much horror.
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