The Ballad of Black Tom

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.

This is the second rewrite of Lovecraft's Horror at Red Hook I've read this year, after Moore's Neonomicon. I suppose there's a reason that story feels relevant to revisit in the 21st century; on one hand, it's easily one of Lovecraft's most blatantly racist, misogynist and just downright... messy stories. On the other, it's about an America (specifically, a pre-gentrification Brooklyn) struggling to find its identity in the conflict between haves and havenots, Anglos and illegal immigrants (specifially, Syrians), Order and Chaos.

There's always the question if you can rewrite Lovecraft without acknowledging and doing something with the less appetizing bits of his writing. Moore skipped part of that by setting his rewrite in the more-or-less present, post-aforementioned-gentrification, and partly by simply revelling in it through his openly racist narrator. LaValle does something cleverer; brings more life to 1925 New York than Lovecraft did, shifts the focus, offers a counter-narrative, plays a counterpoint on a beat-up blues guitar and Son House's lyrics. There's more than one story in America. As people have pointed out, what's horrible in Lovecraft - the realisation that you're not the centre of the universe, that being a bigoted white man doesn't automatically earn you points with a cold uncaring cosmos - is just what everyone else has always had to live with, and built their stories around.

Who's that writing - John the Revelator

Enter Black Tom, who knows his people always lose, but at least he's going to matter.