Victor LaValle’s long-teased X-Series has now been formally announced as Sabretooth! In celebration of this new series by this incredible author, ComicsXF will be launching our first Book Club!

What We’ll Be Reading

The scope of the ComicsXF book club in the future will be broad; we might read novels, short story collections, poetry collections, or nonfiction books by comics creators, influential for comics creators, or relevant to current comics we cover. Always, we hope that the chosen book and subsequent discussion will result in greater understanding or enjoyment of comics.

For this inaugural book club, we’ll be reading Victor LaValle’s novella The Ballad of Black Tom. The Ballad was a Hugo, World Fantasy, Locus, Nebula, and Bram Stoker Award finalist, and won both the Shirley Jackson and British Fantasy awards for best novella. It is a work of cosmic horror— indeed, a reimagining of HP Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Redhook”— that follows man caught up in the tangled schemes of the wealthy and the eldritch.

What We’ll Be Doing

On November 1, our panel for this first Book Club— Andrea Ayres, Armaan Babu, Cassie Tongue, Corey Smith, Jude Jones, Justin Partridge, Robert Secundus, and Stephanie Burt will gather to chat about The Ballad of Black Tom in typical ComicsXF style, a conversation recorded in text. If you enjoy our dialogue driven columns, our Book Club Discussions will be just like that— only less frequent and featuring more people in the conversation. Unlike the columns, this is not a formal ongoing assignment— people will be jumping in and out of the book club depending on their interest in the chosen book each time, which means that this space will feature not only a larger number of voices than our typical articles, but also lots of conversations between folks who haven’t previously written together.

How You Can Participate

Everyone can, of course, read the selected book over the course of the month, and then read our final discussion when it posts. In addition, you can become a more active participant in two ways.

First of all, if you join our ComicsXF discord, you’ll find a channel devoted to the book club, where you’ll be able to chat with CXF writers and readers as we go forward in the book throughout the month.

Second of all, if you are a ComicsXF patron, you’ll be able to submit questions or discussion prompts you’d like us to consider including in the final discussion.

Some Resources as You Read

If you’re interested in learning more about the chosen book, you’d like to hear more from the author, you’re interested in what other people have had to say, or you’d like to explore further contexts, we’ve collected a number of resources for you:

Reviews of The Ballad of Black Tom: