Jessica Woodbury's Reviews > The Ballad of Black Tom

These days there's much discussion about what to do with the difficult legacy of H. P. Lovecraft. What do you do with one of the founders of modern horror who was not only racist but includes those views in his writing? If you're a person who reads widely or likes to deep dive, at some point you may find yourself confronting the question of whether you should read Lovecraft and what it means.

I have good news for you. You don't need to read Lovecraft anymore. Instead, you can read THE BALLAD OF BLACK TOM. LaValle has done something incredible. He's written a Lovecraft novel with themes of racial injustice at its center, turned Lovecraft's legacy on its head. And his real feat is that by giving his book a strong emotional center, he's surpassed Lovecraft.

I read a bit of Lovecraft, I appreciated the weird and the dread and the undercurrent of malevolence in his books, but I never felt like I could burrow myself into one and live in it. There's a coldness to Lovecraft. I don't know if LaValle wanted that same coldness. He certainly holds the reader at arm's length. But there is a big fat beating heart in this book no matter how careful and calculated it is. This is a book that is more about feelings than it is about Cthulu. It is more about shame and hatred and anger and what those feelings do to you than it is about the weird and supernatural.

This is my third LaValle book and I am consistently excited by his work. He does things no one else does. I don't know where his books will take me. And that's one of the highest compliments I can give.