Description: "Shirley Jackson Award-winner LaValle cleverly retcons H.P. Lovecraft's infamous story "The Horror at Red Hook," retelling it with a new protagonist (the titular Charles Thomas Tester, a splendidly Lovecraftian name) and a literary veneer that recalls Chester Himes." -- Publishers Weekly "Wonderfully creepy and impossible to put down, The Ballad of Black Tom is a genre-bending must-read." --BuzzFeed "LaValle's ingenious project involves co-opting Lovecraft's epic-scale paranoia into the service of a trickster tale." -- Locus "This book is full of wonder and horror and pain and magic and I cannot recommend it enough." --BookRiot "LaValle crafts a gem of a Lovecraftian novella, cleverly keeping his horrors just offstage. The real power of the story is Tom's experiences of prejudice as a black man living in early 20th-century Harlem, and how he overcomes and subverts that prejudice, taking on whatever role he has to in order to get by: he is "Charles" to his father, "Tommy" to his friends, and eventually "Black Tom"--one to be feared." -- Library Journal " The Ballad of Black Tom is a fresh take on cosmic horror." -- Dirge Magazine "Victor LaValle brilliantly takes some of Lovecraft's literary motifs and transforms them into social consciousness. To say this is no small feat is a major understatement." -- Diabolique Magazine "With endless creativity and deft, seemingly effortless prose, LaValle has stolen the deliciously demonic soul of old Howard's vilest story and made it into something new." -- The B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog

Please Wait