The Ballad of Black Tom

Rating: 4.5/5 guitars

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle is an amazing and poignant novella, telling the story of Charles Thomas Tester, a young Black man in Harlem. He works hard to provide for himself and his dad, and a routine job to deliver an odd book to a woman Flushing Meadows starts the adventure of a lifetime. Tom plays guitar and sings (pretty poorly), and he draws the attention of a man named Robert Suydam who wants Tom to play for a party he’s having. Before he knows it, Tom is drawn deep into the world of magic and the occult

This novella is based on the H. P. Lovecraft short story “The Horror at Red Hook.” (Disclaimer: I haven’t read Lovecraft because of the racism. I get that a lot of modern horror authors draw from his body of work, but I’d rather spend my limited time reading books by BIPOC authors and just skimming Lovecraft’s Wikipedia pages.) It is told through the perspective of a Black man in the 1920s and the struggles Tom faces as a result of racism and police brutality. As he did in The Devil in Silver, LaValle discusses social issues in a horror setting. Readers see the police actively harm Tom and explore the ramifications of structural racism. And what’s especially haunting is that the horrors Tom experiences in the 1920s are the many of the same horrors Black people in America face today. LaValle is a master at telling very real human stories in a scary, supernatrual context, and he illustrates that real life may be more disturbing than the creepy tales told around campfires.

The Ballad of Black Tom is a truly phenomenal novella, and anyone who likes Lovecraft would love this piece. Shorter stories sometimes struggle to sufficiently develop characters, but LaValle is such a skilled writer that readers get to know Tom quickly. It absolutely has its moments of pure, creepy, terror, but it might also break your heart.