REVIEW: A FANTASTIC NOVEL OF A BLACK

HUSTLER IN 1920'S HARLEM

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

By Zack Graham

The distinction between “literary” and “genre” fiction has blurred over
the last few years. “Genre” writers like Neil Gaiman, Jeff VanderMeer,
and Brian Evenson have won the respect of the literary establishment,
while “literary” writers like Kazuo Ishiguro, Chang-rae Lee and Emily
St. John Mandel have fused their fiction with themes and styles from
earlier masters of the speculative form.

With his new book, The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle has
brilliantly bridged this divide. Black Tom is LaValle’s fifth book, and
follows two critically successful novels, Big Machine and The Devil in
Silver, both edited by Chris Jackson at Spiegel and Grau and enriched
by otherworldly phenomena.

Tester is approached by a rich white man named Robert Suydam, who offers to pay Tester an exorbitant amount of money
to play guitar at his party, and becomes ensnared in a supernatural mystery that leads him to the edge of reality. From this
precipice, Tester reinvents himself as Black Tom, an omnipotent sorcerer who exacts revenge against those (Caucasians)
who have murdered his father and discriminated against him his entire life.

The Ballad of Black Tom is LaValle’s homage to H.P. Lovecraft, one of the most significant horror writers of the 20th
Century. LaValle dedicates the novel to Lovecraft, yet in the dedication he makes clear that he does so with “conflicted
feelings,” a reference to his disdain for Lovecraft’s racist worldview. Lovecraft often focused his fictions on dark energies or
horrors symbolizing fear, and his fear of the “other” is a common recurrence in both his fictions and other writings (see, for
example, his poem “On The Creation of Niggers” for more on that). LaValle’s take on Lovecraft proves to be a tightly
woven, mind-bending journey into a rich world that Lovecraft’s bigotry prevented him from creating.

With The Ballad of Black Tom, LaValle re-appropriates Lovecraftian horror to convey the pain of the black experience in
America. In shifting the source of cosmic terror from bigoted misanthropy to racial injustice, LaValle relocates a nihilistic
phenomenon inside a sociopolitical trauma that has recently gripped American society.
Tommy Tester gravitates toward dark magic to seek racially motivated vengeance, and finds that this energy, though
frighteningly evil, gives him more power than a black man in the early 20th century could have ever had. This brilliant
inversion of Lovecraftian horror is the primary way in which Black Tom succeeds in being an excellent novel as well as an
excellent horror novel.
LaValle’s prose shines when he enters the world of the truly fantastic. His equally evocative descriptions of emotions and
supernatural phenomena illustrate just how surreal real life experiences can be. LaValle’s description of Tommy’s reaction
to his father’s murder, for example: “Inwardly he felt the sun close its distance from the earth; it came near enough to melt
the great majority of Tommy’s internal organs. A fire ran through his body…”
This description comes shortly after a scene in Suydam’s mansion: “the windowpanes took on the color, and apparent
depth, of the sea. It was as if Tommy Tester and Robert Suydam, standing in this room, in this mansion, in the city, were
also peering down at distant waters elsewhere on the globe.” Though Black Tom does have moments of cliché (“mystery
lingered in the air like the scent of the scorched book”), these moments are few and far between. The vast majority of
LaValle’s prose is as powerful as it is imaginative.

The Ballad of Black Tom is a gorgeous Mobius strip of a novel that uses magic, horror, and history to create a lens through
which the injustices of the modern day are alarmingly evident. In completely departing from “literary” fiction, Victor LaValle
has shown us just how resonant “genre” fiction can be.

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