I was never a huge fan of H.P. Lovecraft. I’d known about his fictional mythology surrounding Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones since the first edition of Deities & Demigods, but I never got around to reading any of his works until much later in life. What I didn’t know at the time was how controversial he had become nearly a hundred years after his career as an author in the 1920s and 1930s.
The first of his stories that I had ever read was one of his most famous: The Call of Cthulhu. To me, it was a mess. More like a disjointed narrative than a well-plotted tale. And having read several books by Edward Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, who were Lovecraft’s contemporaries in speculative fiction, I found myself disappointed by the story that gave Lovecraft’s fictional mythos its name.
Still, I was well aware of how influential H.P. Lovecraft had been to the genres of horror and speculative fiction, inspiring a legion of writers from Fritz Leiber to Stephen King. So, in 2014, I bought a beautiful, hard-bound copy of The New Annotated Lovecraft with an introduction by Alan Moore. But other than skimming through some of the artwork, I did not read a page of it until last year when HBO released Lovecraft Country.
Lovecraft Country was a fantastic show, and it shined a light on the most significant problem with H.P. Lovecraft — his racism. The show acknowledges this clearly, but then tells a story steeped in Lovecraftian mythology, complete with hordes of shoggoths. As the main character, Atticus — a fan of pulp fiction and Lovecraft’s tales — tells the lady he’s walking with in the first scene: “Stories are like people. It doesn’t make them perfect. You just try to cherish them, overlook their flaws.”
Then the lady reminds him: “But the flaws are still there.”
The Ballad of Black Tom
Around the time Lovecraft Country aired, Vox published an article titled “Lovecraftian horror — and the racism at its core — explained.” The article recounts Lovecraft’s troubled upbringing and history of mental illness and attempts to explain how he might have developed his racist views. At the same time, it acknowledges that he was one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers, an author whose stories saturated the landscape of horror and fantasy fiction. Then the article turns to Lovecraft Country and the works of African American authors who write fiction steeped in Lovecraftian mythology while grappling with Lovecraft’s racist past. One of those authors was Victor LaValle, and that’s how I discovered his novella, The Ballad of Black Tom.
Here’s an excerpt from the article about LaValle’s view of Lovecraft:
“He’s so woven in, I think for horror as a whole, it would feel to me a little bit like removing an arm,” Black horror writer Victor LaValle, who often writes Lovecraftian fiction, told me. “And so instead I feel like an alternative choice is to identify the illness and then maybe you can save the arm.”
In The Ballad of Black Tom, LaValle reimagines one of Lovecraft’s stories, The Horror at Red Hook, from the perspective of a Black man. The Horror at Red Hook is considered one of Lovecraft’s most racist works because of how he describes the “foreigners” who inhabited that part of Brooklyn, where Lovecraft lived for a short time in the 1920s. The story concerns Thomas Malone, an Irish-born police detective investigating a reclusive millionaire named Robert Suydam. Malone soon discovers that Suydam is the leader of a mysterious cult of foreigners (whom Lovecraft describes as “creatures” at one point) involved in the worship of dark and terrible gods.
LaValle begins his novella with a dedication to H.P. Lovecraft:
“For H.P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings.”
The Horror at Red Hook may be Lovecraft’s only story set in New York, making it the perfect venue for LaValle to interject his protagonist, a Harlem-born hustler named Tommy Tester. When Tommy is not out conning people into believing he’s a street musician, he’s procuring occult items for buyers throughout New York. One involves a book (that may have been based on Lovecraft’s Necronomicon) for a creepy old lady in Queens. But Tommy has a conscience, too, so he secretly removes the book’s final page so the woman cannot work whatever evil magic she had planned.
The story really takes off, however, when Suydam hires Tommy to play at a mysterious party. Tommy soon learns the event may have something to do with the king of the Great Old Ones — Cthulhu himself. Add Malone and his brash partner into the mix, and you have a suspenseful, page-turning tale with a clear message, much like Lovecraft Country. Coincidentally, The Ballad of Black Tom was released the same day as the novel that inspired the HBO series.
The Ballad of Black Tom is a vast improvement on Lovecraft’s original. It also makes better use of the Cthulhu mythos than The Horror at Red Hook. And if you’re interested in how one modern writer of Lovecraftian fiction deals with Lovecraft’s legacy, you’ll likely find it to be a good and thought-provoking read.