“People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn’t there.

“Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father’s head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic, and earns the attention of things best left sleeping.

“A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?”

Spoilers follow in our discussion of the book.

Robert Secundus: Welcome everyone to the first meeting of the ComicsXF Book Club! Normally in these intro sections to discussions we start off with some bit, but I think for these panels, before we jump into more specific discussion, I just want to start us all off by going around and asking everyone: what did you think of the book? As soon as I began listening to The Ballad of Black Tom, I couldn’t stop. I found it an absolutely mesmerizing experience, if it’s not too corny to frame the experience in magical terms. 

Armaan Babu: So this was a little bit outside of my comfort zone – when I’m not reading superhero comics, I’m reading straight up, set-in-another world fantasy, so I’m grateful for this book club for giving me an excuse for something new, and I definitely enjoyed this book. I love the city it drew me into, and its vividness. To draw me in as it did and then bring in its alien horror left me…unsettled. In a good way.

Corey Smith: I was hesitant going in, but I ended up absolutely loving it! I’ll admit to not reading any of LaValle’s prior work, since my itch for unknowable horror that would drive one to the breaking point is generally scratched by the twin talons of the SCP wiki or spending more than five consecutive minutes on Twitter, but I’m glad for the opportunity to branch out! The genre might not typically appeal to me, but I’ve learned that LaValle’s style does.

Zachary Jenkins: I used to listen to the complete recordings of 30s Blues guitarist Robert Johnson when I was in high school. You know the myth of the guy who sells his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads and in return becomes the greatest man to ever play guitar? That was his tall tale. His brand of Delta Blues, just a guitar that feels like it is playing too many parts at once, mixed with a rambling voice that is imbued with pain and passion is in a word, mesmerizing.

While not being a big Lovecraft guy (I’ve read The Call of Cthulhu and understand the appeal) it too fixates itself with grabbing a reader and dragging them into tighter and tighter spirals as it works to comprehend the incomprehensible. In that way LaValle truly pulls on two disparate elements and myths, one celebrating Black accomplishments in the 30s and one filled with hate for that same people and creates something special. 

Tom and Mallone 

Rob: I was absolutely shocked when we not only left Tom’s perspective halfway through the narrative, but entered Mallone’s. I’m wondering what you folks thought of this choice: Did you find the structure of the novel compelling, and what do you make of that specific shift in POV? 

Armaan: Like I said in the intro, I found this book unsettling, and the POV shift definitely contributes to that. We get to know Tommy, walk a fair bit in his shoes, get ourselves immersed in his world that’s rich with detail, and flavor. As the horror starts to ramp up, there’s that feeling of being able to cling to something familiar. No matter what happens, Tommy is there – and then, all of a sudden, without warning, he’s not.

It’s a shocking moment, yes, but it’s also a really uncomfortable one. Something is wrong, but the author won’t tell us what it is. He’s taken away our only friend in this book and forced us to spend time with a deeply unpleasant person – someone who doesn’t know the story that we know. It’s a doubling down of discomfort as we see the story from a more outside perspective – Mallone has no idea what is really happening, and it makes the strangeness that much stranger. 

Mallone’s POV also takes our sympathetic protagonist and others him. There’s his obvious racism, but there’s also a reintroduction to Tommy. Gone is Tommy, the man just trying to make a buck and keep his father safe. Now we have Black Tom, bearer of a bloodstained guitar and enforcer for a man whose power can’t quite be defined. It’s not easy to make a character you’ve been rooting for feel like someone you should be afraid of, but POV shifts are a pretty good way to go. 

Zachary: I think it is important to what LaValle wants to say about Lovecraft that we lose insight into Tommy’s mind for the truly climatic segments of this. Black Tom is the monster Lovecraft saw in anyone he deemed “other”. But we know Tommy, we’ve seen his struggle against the world of the 30s. In the same way, we have seen the joy he takes in his community. While he does monstrous things, it is not because he is “the other”. Tommy receives evil and returns it twentyfold. To understand his impact, we must see him through the eyes of Malone. To understand his motivation, it’s critical that we saw through his own.

Corey: If I’m being honest, even at the end I think I understood Black Tom better than I did Malone. That’s not me trying to be edgy, or due to any antipathy on my part, but when I read his final words to Malone, “I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day,” I couldn’t help but nod, because yeah. Throughout the entire story, Tommy was abused, taken advantage of, and condescended to by the white supremacist forces of the society around him. The amount petty, banal, never-ending racism that Black Americans have to deal with gets absolutely soul-crushing even now, let alone in 1924, and it doesn’t take much of a narrative leap from “soul-crushing” to “soul-selling.” At least with an Elder God, you know where you stand  — I can absolutely see where he’s coming from.

The fact that Malone is our secondary viewpoint only drives this further home, as far as I’m concerned. The rule is “ACAB” in general, but Malone is absolutely a bastard specifically, even if he’s less overt about it than Howard. While both of our point-of-view characters are aware of the occult, and have knowledge of things beyond mortal understanding, Tester advises people away from it, while Malone walks around with a notebook full of forbidden knowledge and stolen words tucked into his pocket. While Malone may not actively work towards bringing Cthulhu into the world, his status as a “seeker” is an inherently active role. His narration makes it clear that he didn’t participate not due to any sense of morality, but cowardice. Malone is comfortable with the status quo, but still arrogant enough to meddle. When it comes down to it, he’s just as hubristic as Suydam, and wasn’t at all resolved by his own inaction.

The Sleeping King Awakens

Rob: The novel ends with the protagonist completing the ritual to awaken Cthulhu and summon the Great Old Ones to Earth. What did everyone make of this ending? 

Armaan: I think it tied everything together great. We get an explanation for what happened to Tommy, what turned him to Black Tom, and that horror of an ending – he doomed the world, and there is nothing anyone can do to change that now. The line that’s going to stick with me is, at the moment he’s coming to terms with what he’s done –  “Every time I was around them, they acted like I was a monster. So I said goddamnit, I’ll be the worst monster you ever saw!” 

It’s a very succinct description of what the whole book’s about.

The first half of the book brought up a lot of helpless rage at the injustices that Tommy goes through. There’s something satisfying in the titular ballad of Black Tom, at the heart of pure chaotic cacophony, choosing to burn the world down for what it’s done to him. 

But the moment that’s going to stick with me is that one, youthful moment of laughter shared with his friend: “Both men laughed loudly, and for a brief moment Black Tom appeared as he had been not so long ago: twenty years old and in possession of great joy.” 

I’m not a big horror fan, but the horror I have enjoyed mingles humanity, regret and a mournful sense of finality to something unfathomably wrong. The POV shift may have shown us Black Tom, the monster, but we get to see Tommy again one last time before the end. This could very well have just ended on a beautifully spine-chilling note, but instead, I get my heart broken – and that’s what leaves a mark.

Zachary: I think Armaan nails it by looking at the closing chapter of the book, but there is one line there that sits with me. Tommy laments to Buckeye in the dining room of the Victoria Society, a Mecca of Black culture in New York, saying “Nobody here ever called me a monster, so why’d I go running somewhere else, to be treated like a dog?”

What Tommy does is out of anger, righteous anger, but anger nonetheless. He has executed his vengeance but the cost of his community, his whole world. If it takes the Old Ones eons to return or minutes, it matters not. Tommy can never step foot in Red Hook again. I think many of us wrestle with the idea of burning it all down when faced with injustice, what The Ballad Of Black Tom does is play out that fantasy, with all the ramifications that come with it.

Rob: Building on the above comments, for me at least, the ending wasn’t a pure tragedy, and that’s what made it so haunting. I think the book leaves us with the possibility that that righteous anger, that sacrifice of youth and joy, really is the one proper response to this world of radical injustice. 

Corey: I mentioned it in the last section, but it bears repeating: Tommy’s “I’d take Cthulhu over you devils any day” stuck with me, and encapsulated the whole hell of the story. I’m not gonna say that inviting an uncaring god into the world is a perfect example of direct action activism, but it’s hard not to see the parallels! Especially when we’re met with lines like “I did something big, bigger than anyone will understand for a long time.” Exacting change, even immeasurably huge ones, isn’t always as quick as we might like. 

At the same time, fighting constant systemic injustice through any means, even excluding the supernatural, is absolutely exhausting. That Black Tom jumps out of the window, that Tommy Tester’s body is never found, rings far too true to how many activists have burned out over the years, have given everything they had to the movement until there was nothing left but memory and song. It’s the story of Black activists throughout history, and that it can’t even be escaped through fiction just shows how utterly true it is. At the end of the day, Tommy Tester is erased utterly, body and soul, to the point where even his actions and motivations are reattributed to the closest white man. For now, until the results of Tester’s actions are felt, the only people who will truly care that he’s gone are Buckeye, and the other Black people he knew.  

Why Lovecraft? 

Rob: The question that one typically asks when reading modern Lovecraftian horror is: why make it Lovecraftian at all? Why tie one’s Cosmic Horror narrative to this very specific literary tradition and this specific author? What does a story gain from engaging with rather than avoiding Lovecraft today? And so I put it to you: What value did you find in the ties to Lovecraft here? 

Zachary: For folks not in the know, The Ballad Of Black Tom is akin to a remix of the Lovecraft story “The Horror at Red Hook” where Detective Malone investigates occult happenings that one Robert Suydam is tied to. To wrestle with the legacy of Lovecraft, LaValle writes two stories, one that is his and one that is H.P.’s. The segments with Tommy are subversive, with Malone, he plays the story straight.

So much of modern horror is owed to Lovecraft. That is a fact that must be acknowledged. Generously, he’s a problematic fav for many. There is a school of thought that believes in abstinence only approaches to creators who held abhorrent beliefs. It’s an approach I find very limiting and puritanical. People are not good or bad, we are shades of grey who are capable of great love and great evil. We are Charles Thomas Tester. We are Black Tom. So if we choose not to bury our heads in the sand, we must choose to confront this head on. 

LaValle opens with his acknowledgement “For H.P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings.” It’s clear that LaValle admires the craft and impact of Lovecraft; it’s just as clear that he knows Lovecraft would despise him for the color of his skin. It’s two truths and LaValle’s choice to let them push and pull against one another makes for a fascinating read. One could even see Suydam’s racist intellectual mystic as LaValle’s way to directly confront Lovecraft. With The Ballad Of Black Tom, LaValle shows how we can engage with media that has been stained by its creators and use what was good in it to build something greater.

Armaan: I didn’t actually know about “The Horror At Red Hook” going into this book – I’ve not actually read any Lovecraft, and the more I hear about him the less I want to. However, the Lovecraftian genre does come up in a lot of my favorite things, and some things keep coming up.

One of the things that these stories, inspired by Lovecraft, keep coming back to is the idea of power fantasies gone wrong. Cultists who are willing to destroy the entire world in the long run and hurt people in horrific and cruel ways in the short run, all in the hopes of gaining ultimate power when the world ends. We get to see that here with Suydam – a rich, old, white man who truly doesn’t understand the devastating effects of the power he’s trying to attain. And we get Tommy Tester – who wants power for a completely different reason. 

Like I mentioned earlier, I felt a lot of helpless rage for the things Tommy went to. It’s a relatable rage. Everyone who’s ever felt helpless has at some point wished for the power to just burn down everything that’s wrong with the world in one fell swoop without a thought as to what the fallout may be. The impossible fantasy that their rage can let loose something that makes the world better – or at least hurt the ones that ruined it. Black Tom did achieve the latter quite effectively, but what makes this such a good horror tale is we get enough time, at the end, to sit in the horror of what he’s unleashed.

What I’ve always seen in Lovecraftian tales is that temptation – that eagerness of power twisted in the most terrible ways. I think this book took that theme and played it out perfectly.

Rob: For Victor LaValle’s thoughts on this subject, of engaging with bigotted art, and of making better art in response, readers should check out this interview with Vice and this interview with NPR. For more of his thoughts on HP Lovecraft, see also his introduction to the 2014 edition of The New Annotated HP Lovecraft. Anyone interested in other Writers of Color responding to, revising, reclaiming, and otherwise grappling with the ugliness and influence of Lovecraft might want to start with the work of Cassandra Khaw and Kij Johnson.

Corey: I am very much not a Lovecraft person either. While his impact on culture has been undeniable, and there are some intriguing ideas there, I just can’t bring myself to spend more time than I have to on a man who was so racist that white dudes in the 1930’s went “damn.” LaValle, like one of the driving forces in the story, approached Lovecraft’s work from outside, and created something better than the source material could ever hope for. Gotta say, it worked a hell of a lot better than I thought it would, to the point where I picked up The Changeling almost immediately after finishing this. 

LaValle’s sense of style throughout this book is astounding, and massively unsettling. While I haven’t read much Lovecraft, I have read a lot of Lovecraftian fiction, and I appreciated that The Ballad of Black Tom was ultimately more concerned with the people than the monsters.  While this is by no means unique, it’s a perspective I appreciate a lot more than the alternative, and the novel does a brilliant job of getting into what would drive someone to decide “fuck it, let ‘em all drown.”

Rob Secundus

Robert Secundus is an amateur-angelologist-for-hire.

Armaan Babu

Armaan is obsessed with the way stories are told. From video games to theater, TTRPGs to comics, he has written for, and about, them all. He will not stop, actually; believe us, we've tried.

Lex Smith

Lex Smith is probably tired right now. They're definitely trying not to think about everything they have to write! When they're not staring at a blank Word document, odds are they're tweeting, playing Pokémon or wondering how they ended up with such a smart-ass kid.

Zachary Jenkins

Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.