“The Horror at Red Hook” shows Lovecraft at his worst. It manages to build something open-minded and engaging from the paranoid mess of its source material. The novella works both as a heartfelt and powerful dissection of Lovecraft’s work, and as a vibrant and chilling work of Weird fiction in its own right. Set in the background of “The Horror at Red Hook” (1927), The Ballad of Black Tom cleverly uses the scaffolding of one of Lovecraft’s most explicitly racist stories to show up the flaws and limitations in the man’s worldview, whilst celebrating the power of his imagination as a writer. Lovecraft, “with all my conflicted feelings”. LaValle, an African American writer, dedicates the novella to H. Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) is a timely work of Weird fiction that shows how a talented writer can use the tools and motifs from the Weird fiction toolbox to create an utterly modern take on the cosmic horror story, even as it wrestles with the legacy of Weird fiction and its most iconic proponent. “I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day.” “What was indifference compared to malice?”
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