NOTE: this is the first of ten reviews of contemporary weird novels. An overview of the project can be found in the previous post.
The Ballad of Black Tom
is Victor LaValle’s fifth book. LaValle, who won a Shirley Jackson Award and an American Book Award, is an efficient writer. This novel revises the Lovecraft mythos by rewriting one of his most racist stories from a Black perspective. It is the best of several recent fictional “replies” to weird racism. (The others are Mat Johnson’s Pym, which was written about a decade ago and is, after the first three or four chapters, awful and Lovecraft Country, which will be discussed in the next post.) LaValle’s short novel (150 pages) is set in the New York of 1924. It is divided into two parts; the first focalizes on Tommy Tester, a young Black man who hustles to support his father, with whom he shares an apartment on West 144th Street. The second focalizes on Malone, the police officer profiled in Lovecraft’s story, “The Horror at Red Hook.” To understand what’s at stake in LaValle’s book, we must return to the scene of the crime, Lovecraft’s story.
Lovecraft wrote “The Horror at Red Hook” during the few years that he lived in New York City, at first with his wife Sonia, then by himself. According to accounts based on his letters, it was one of the most miserable periods of his life. His neuroticism and paranoia reach a near-hallucinatory intensity, and many of his most virulently racist rants date from this period. A thorough accounting of Lovecraft’s racism is beyond the scope of these posts, but the history of criticism on this weird author is in part a history of acknowledging, dodging, and excusing his extremely conservative views. Rather than retread that ground, I would refer my readers to the best essay on Lovecraft’s racism: “Lovecraft at the Automat,” by J. M. Tyree, which appeared in New England Review ten years ago. As Tyree argues, “’The Horror at Red Hook’ is in fact Red Hook itself, or, more precisely, a neurotic race fantasy turned into a supernatural monstrosity by imaginative hyperbole. Resident aliens become the worshipers and handmaidens of actual and literal alien beings.” (144) The story becomes a screed against New York’s working-class, multi-ethnic neighborhoods; in Lovecraft’s view, immigrants from the Caribbean, the Middle East, China, and Eastern Europe, along with people of African and Jewish descent, threaten the hierarchy of white “stock” by introducing into the United States a “babble” of non-English languages, rituals, and habits. As Lovecraft puts it in the final paragraphs: “As for Red Hook—it is always the same. [. . .] the evil spirit of darkness and squalor broods on amongst the mongrels [. . .]The soul of the beast is omnipresent and triumphant, and Red Hook’s legions of blear-eyed, pockmarked youths still chant and curse and howl as they file from abyss to abyss, [. . .] pushed on by blind laws of biology which they may never understand.”
The story is told in the past tense by an unnamed narrator who has most but not all the facts of the case. The “case” (part psychological study, part police procedural) is that of Thomas F. Malone, an Irish-American police detective who, at the time the story is told, is living in Rhode Island, attempting to recover from the trauma he encountered in Red Hook, a Brooklyn neighborhood just west of Park Slope. On the waterfront below Governor’s Island, Red Hook is known for its shipping yards—it was the busiest port in the world when Lovecraft wrote about it. It’s working-class, immigrant and Black population has also made it the poster-child of inner-city decay. In the 1930s it was a “Hooverville”; in the 1990s it was “the crack capital of America.” Lovecraft did his best to contribute to these views, portraying the neighborhood as a den of depravity. Malone’s case involves illegal immigration, human smuggling, kidnapping, child sacrifice, demonic rituals, and a “dream” of hell. Malone pursues Robert Suydam, an independently wealthy white man who recruits recent immigrants into an army of devil worshippers that help him, apparently, to bring hell to earth. At the last minute, Suydam repents, closing the portal that would release Lovecraft’s hell, which is part global multitude and part pseudo-gothic demonology.
Today Lovecraft’s name has become so firmly identified with the genre that skeptics might imagine weird fiction to be inherently racist. Tyree wonders if it is; he argues that “From Poe on down, there has always been something more or less reactionary about the genre of horror fiction. Its underlying fear of otherness often morphs into literal nightmares of alien beings and unnatural monstrosities” (137), but then observes that Richard Wright regarded weird fiction as necessary to his education as a novelist. The weirdness of weird fiction becomes the relation between weirdness and racial otherness. To what extent is weirdness premised on “otherness” or exoticism, whether understood as Orientalism or blackness? Poe was racist, but his best weird stories (“William Wilson,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” etc.) don’t use racial alienation to generate weirdness; they are organized around verisimilitude rather than difference—around eroticism rather than exoticism. (To exemplify this structure of difference, one should consider Shakespeare’s erotically weird A Midsummer’s Night Dream and exotically weird The Tempest.) On the other hand, Poe’s weird novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, is an exotic romance that features two notorious episodes of racism. The first is a mutiny led in part by a “devilish” Black cook, the second are the inhabitants of Tsalal, who are so completely black that even their teeth are ebony. They prove to be childish yet merciless, primitive yet capable of the most wicked deceit. Such episodes, full of horror and wonder as they are, would not have met Lovecraft’s criterion of “cosmic dread.” The figure in Poe’s Pym who stands for the reality-shattering impossible thing is a towering white figure that hovers in the air like a frost giant above Pym at the story’s conclusion: “And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.” (173) Lovecraft replaces Poe’s Great White Man with monsters that embody Poe’s savages. Dread Cthulhu, who like Poe’s figure stands for the ultimately unknown, is also the fetish object of voodoo rites.
In my analysis, weird fiction has always enjoyed a characteristically unsettled relation to the worlds that it creates. After reading too many romances, Don Quixote mistakes himself for a knight and the world around him for a mythic land. Cervantes’ novel makes numerous, hilarious references to itself, setting up a kind of double-entendre when characters in the second volume read the first volume. This metafictional play is taken up in Tristram Shandy, which presents the novel itself as the “impossible thing.” Poe’s Pym is the well-spring of a more modern kind of metafiction: the creation of a “mythos,” or a fictional world shared by multiple characters in multiple stories by multiple authors. One is used to the fantasy world created by a single author that spans numerous texts, and one may be aware of authorial collaborations between authors, such as the Surrealists. But only in weird fiction has it become a regular practice for authors to set stories in other author’s fictional worlds (more recently, slash and fan fiction follow this formula). The trick is to treat those fictional worlds as part of a shared reality. The weird “Preface” to Poe’s Pym sets the stage by developing a dialectical relationship between reality and fiction, realism and romance. In the preface, signed by “A. G. Pym,” Poe’s narrator explains that upon returning from his adventures, he was approached by Poe, then editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe urges him to write his story, but Pym refuses, arguing that “the incidents to be narrated were of a nature so positively marvelous that . . . the public at large would regard what I should put forth as merely and impudent and ingenious fiction.” (263) Poe’s solution is to “draw up in his own words” a version of the adventure based on “facts” that Pym provides, which is published under his own name in the Southern Messenger. Poe presents them “under the garb of fiction.” (264) But “despite the air of fable” which Poe “ingeniously” lends Pym’s truth, “the public were still not disposed to receive it as fable.” In other words, as they did with the other hoaxes, they mistake the fiction for truth. This convinces Pym that “the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity.” (264) Thus, the novel we are about to read. By referencing two chapters published in the January and February issues of the Messenger, the fictional character Pym anchors his preface in the actual world; he then explains that the “marvelous” that actually exists (in fiction), when presented as fiction (a fictional fiction), will be taken as fact (a fictional factuality). He is therefore justified in presenting his (fictional) facts without fabulation.
Jules Verne recognized the metafictional space that Poe was attempting to describe about ten years after it was published. He thought about it for decades. Pym’s narrative was the subject of the “only piece of literary criticism he ever published,” and he returned to it in 1897, when he wrote The Sphinx of the Ice Realm. (A beautifully translated and edited edition of Verne’s and Poe’s novels by Frederic Paul Walter was published in 2012 by SUNY Press. It is one of the most valuable publications made possible by the recent return to the weird.) Verne’s explorers read Pym’s account; they retrace parts of his voyage, confirming and correcting the original fiction. Minor characters in Poe’s story become important figures in Verne’s, but Sphinx is not merely a sequel because for its characters Poe’s novel is a fiction which they increasingly discover to be factual as they sail into the unknown regions of Poe’s (fictional / actual) Antarctica. Lovecraft borrows heavily on both stories for Mountains of Madness. But the other, more interesting absorption of this idea was the perpetuation of Lovecraft’s world in numerous stories written by him and his disciples. Certain places (Miskotonic University, Arkham Asylum) and certain monsters (Cthulhu, Shoggoths) became the basis for countless stories shared across a wide range of media. The phrase uttered by Poe’s savages—“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”—may now be heard in countless stories.
This is the generic history Black Tom inherits. LaValle doesn’t use any narrative frames, but it begins with a claim that seems aimed at Lovecraft: “People who move to New York always make the same mistake. They can’t see the place. . . . They come looking for magic, whether evil or good, and nothing will convince them it isn’t here.” (9) This phrase sets up the initial hesitation: will we encounter a “magical” New York, or will it be a place of fantasy—and if so, whose? This is the central theme of the book. Charles Thomas Tester knows how to “make a living from this error.” A “dutiful son,” he “hustles” for his father, a widowed, disabled brick-layer, who spends his retirement in their small apartment, singing the blues. People call Tommy “a scammer, a swindler, a con,” but he prefers to think of himself as an “entertainer.” (11) He can’t carry a tune, but he performs versions of the Blues Man for white people who want to experience Harlem’s dark mystery at a safe distance. At the beginning of the novel, he’s running what appears to be a typical hustle. A rich old white woman in Queens is looking for a book of black magic; Tommy claims to have found it for her. Carefully dressed to look “the part of the dazzling, down-and-out musician,” (11), he crosses the segregated city. He’s learned how to appear “unremarkable, invisible, compliant . . . in an all white neighborhood. Survival techniques.” (12-13) But the hustle requires him to manifest Blackness for his client, whose name is Ma Att. He is selling Harlem exoticism. When she asks him where he acquired the book, he invents a dangerous-sounding nightclub: “’There’s a place in Harlem,’ Tommy said, his voice hushed. ‘It’s called the Victoria Society. Even the hardest gangsters in Harlem are afraid to go there. It’s where people like me trade in books like yours. And worse.’” (15) In the novel’s world, the Victoria Society is a Caribbean social club that caters to nostalgic immigrants by providing the atmosphere of “a British tearoom.” (19) In short, Tommy’s pulling a kind of “Lovecraft scam”: convincing overly sensitive white people that their dark fantasies are really out there—in a Harlem he knows they won’t dare enter. But this relation between truth and reality is complicated by the object which Tommy delivers. It is a curious book: “no larger than the palm of Tommy’s hand. It’s front and back covers were sallow yellow. Three words had been etched on both sides. Zig Zag Zig. Tommy didn’t know what the words meant, nor did he care to know. … A good hustler isn’t curious.” (14) But he doesn’t fail to notice that when he hands the book to his client “a faint trail of smoke appeared in the air,” as though “glancing contact with daylight had set the book on fire.” (15) And, just to be safe, he’s directed his father to cut out the final page of the book, thus presumably disabling its magic, while allowing Tommy to tell his client the truth that he hasn’t touched the book. Tommy negotiates the black market in black magic with a skepticism that extends on both directions. He knows that he’s supplying the “black” part of her fantasy but isn’t sure where the “magic” begins and ends. For readers of the genre, the book’s weirdness is magnified by its color, which calls to mind The King in Yellow, an episode of weird mythology created by Robert Chambers using elements from Ambrose Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa.” (The Chambers-Bierce mythos was the most likely model for Lovecraft’s mythos.)
On this visit to Queens, Tommy realizes the advantage of pretending to be a blues singer in white neighborhoods, where “outer-borough bohunks ad Paddys probably didn’t know a damn thing about serious jazz, so Tommy’s knockoff version might still stand out.” (18) This scheme brings him, a few days later, to Flatbush in Brooklyn, where he encounters none other than Robert Suydam, the villain of Lovecraft’s story. Suydam offers him a year’s salary to play guitar at a party he will be holding in a few days. Tommy agrees. But a few minutes after Suydam leaves, Tommy’s assaulted by a private dick and Malone; they’ve been following Suydam on behalf of his family, who wishes to declare the devil worshiper insane. This part of the story is related in “The Horror at Red Hook,” minus Tommy of course. Tommy discusses the gig with his father, who gives him a straight razor to keep under this shirt in case things go south. On his way back to Flatbush, Tommy’s harassed by white kids, playing neighborhood vigilantes, but they don’t follow him onto the grounds of Suydam’s estate—more fearful of what is to be found there than of a Black man in their borough. It turns out that Suydam has invited Tommy to a rehearsal and planning session, rather than to the party proper. In his gothic library, he tells Tommy that he hasn’t really invited him for his (nonexistent) musical skills, but because “you understood illusion.” (46) He gives Tommy a pitch, offering a better life. “Your people,” Suydam says, sounding just like Lovecraft, “are forced to live in mazes of hybrid squalor. It’s all sounds and filth and spiritual putrescence.” Tommy’s confused. “You talking about Harlem?” he asks. (47) This failure of Suydam’s vision to describe the friendly, free-spirited Harlem in which Tommy lives is one half of LaValle’s critique. In the same scene, we are brought fully into Lovecraft’s universe, with descriptions of the Great Old Ones and especially the “King who sleeps at the bottom of the ocean”—presumably Cthulhu. (50) Several weird things occur while Tommy’s in the library. For a second, Suydam appears to be shape-shifting. Outside the windows, Tommy glimpses what appears to be the city beneath the sea. When he opens the door to leave, he finds himself face-to-face with Malone, yet not: “Tommy realized something strange about Malone, or about Malone’s surroundings. While Tommy stood in the library of Robert Suydam’s home, Malone stood in what looked to be the lobby of an apartment building. . . It was as if the two locations—mansion and tenement lobby—had been stitched together by a haphazard tailor, Tommy Tester and Detective Malone facing each other because of a bad splice in reality’s fabric.” (52) This “splice” occurs between multiple realities. In the novel, it bridges space and time; it also bridges the two narratives the compose the book (Tommy’s and Malone’s). It also bridges the color line: a splice between white and black protagonists. It also splices stories: Lovecraft’s and LaValle’s.
At this point, the novel develops a trope used by other writers, particularly Ruff in Lovecraft Country. It juxtaposes the horror of the fantastic with the horror of “real world” racism. While Tommy’s at Suydam’s, the private detective, an asshole from Texas named Howard (Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, the Texan who created Conan, bonded over a shared sense of white supremacy), breaks into his apartment in search of the missing page from Ma Att’s book; he murders Tommy’s father, claiming that he mistook the old man’s guitar for a gun. He is, of course, not charged for the crime. Numb, disgusted, burning with rage, Tommy returns to Suydam’s party, where the old man rallies a horde of disreputable immigrants, promising them a new world in exchange for his leadership. “But Tommy Tester couldn’t celebrate such a thing. Maybe yesterday the promise of a reward in this new world could’ve tempted Tommy, but today such a thing seemed worthless. Destroy it all, then hand what was left over to Robert Suydam and these gathered goons? What would they do differently? Mankind didn’t make messes; mankind was the mess.” (76) Opening the library’s magic doors, Tommy walks into hell… His rage, provoked by racial injustice, generates a “cosmic” degree of “indifference” for humanity; he goes in search of all the evil he can find. This is the second part of LaValle’s critique; the black man becomes the true subject (rather than intended object) of Suydam’s black magic; reborn as Black Tom, it’s the former kid from Harlem who will decide humanity’s fate.
The second half of The Ballad of Black Tom picks up the thread of Malone’s narrative, repeating with new details and a shocking twist the events related in Lovecraft’s story. Malone is the closest Lovecraft comes to creating a hard-boiled romantic lead of the Black Mask school. Dublin-born (the whitest of white “stock,” to use Lovecraft’s term), Malone is a typically “sensitive” weird hero. Unlike Dupin or Holmes, his irrationalism allows him to see what other, more procedurally-oriented minds, cannot. “He would often regard it as merciful that most persons of high intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries;” Lovecraft tells us, “for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe.” Such is the texture of Lovecraft’s racism; the “Horror at Red Hook” may be the polyglot masses, but the villain of his narrative is a wealthy old white man with the intelligence and willfulness to set the plot in motion. In Lovecraft’s world, the ruffians are incapable of anything but obedience. Malone “was conscious, as one who united imagination with scientific knowledge, that modern people under lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive patterns of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life and ritual observances; and he had often viewed with an anthropologist’s shudder the chanting, cursing processions of blear-eyed and pockmarked young men which wound their way along in the dark small hours of morning. One saw groups of these youths incessantly; sometimes in leering vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways playing eerily on cheap instruments of music, sometimes in stupefied dozes or indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables near Borough Hall, and sometimes in whispering converse around dingy taxicabs drawn up at the high stoops of crumbling and closely shuttered old houses.” Such is Lovecraft’s Red Hook: whatever “cosmic dread” may result, it’s wellspring is this very ordinary structure of white nationalism, which views the daily life of people of color as a primal anarchy.
LaValle revises this world in two ways. He grants agency to Tommy and, curiously, he reforms Malone, recusing him, as it were, from Lovecraft’s racism. LaValle’s Malone is at least halfway likeable. His “sensitivity” manifests as “sympathy” for Suydam and Tommy, and a dislike for Howard’s brutality and racism. His narrative also supports one of the novel’s most intense (and unfortunately final) moments of weirdness. The single best moment occurs when Malone and Howard visit Ma Att:
At the doorway, a stooped, slim woman had appeared, her nose prominent, hair pulled back tightly. But behind that woman, Malone swore he saw—what? More of her. Some great bulk trailed behind her, off into the distance of the gloomy front hall. Nearly everyone else—ones not so sensitive, so attuned—would’ve dismissed this as a trick of the shadows, a bit of bent light. Insensitive minds always dispel true knowledge. But Malone couldn’t ignore the sense of her length, of largeness, behind the figure of this woman at the door. Not a second presence, but the rest of hers. (84)
This is the stuff of weird fiction: the glimpse of an impossibility; a hint at a world beyond, the suggestion of a thing that can’t be said. The “hesitation” Todorov places at the heart of the genre depends upon this sort of parallax view. As soon at the thing comes fully to light, the weirdness is lost. Weird fiction’s impossible thing is like the denouement of a mystery; once it steps into the light, the writer has only a few scenes before the reader’s interest evaporates. The impossible thing decays into an illusion or delusion, or into a “miracle”—an impossible thing which must, in the fictional world, be treated as a fact. Unlike detective fiction, however, weird fiction doesn’t require this climactic unveiling. Weird fiction promises what Keats called “negative capability”; many of the best stories leave the hesitation intact, and each truly weird story must wipe the slate clean after the last adventure. Readers must imagine a world without magic in order to experience its possibility afresh. Consequently, the Lovecraft mythos poses a problem for the genre: inasmuch as the Great Old Ones are already known (by the reader) to exist in the (fictional) world, the primal hesitation is already lost.
The Ballad of Black Tom confronts this problem when we turn to Malone’s narrative. We know already what he will find beneath the squalid tenements at Red Hook; LaValle’s task is to revise not only the plot and theme, but the nature of the weirdness. He does this far better than many contemporary weird writers, but his scenes lack the intensity of description and manifestation of incredulity that produces truly weird suspense. As Malone begins to realize Suydam’s plan—as in the original story, he wants to gain immortality and power by opening a magic portal to the city beneath the waves—he encounters various weird happenings, but they are rendered with a definiteness and inevitability that prevents them from generating much weirdness. Returning a third time to Ma Att’s, he discovers that the house itself is gone:
Only a week ago he’d been at this address. He had met Ma Att at the threshold of her home. . . And now it seemed Ma Att was gone. Her entire cottage, too. The walls, the roof, the windows, the little mailbox that hung by the front door. Gone The front lawn, too. All of it had been pulled up out of the ground like weeds. Nothing remained by the house’s sewage and water pipes. They peeked out of the soil like a partially unearthed skeleton. The plot resembled an open grave.
“How?” Malone said again, but nothing more. (110)
But two very short paragraphs later, he’s “recovered” and sets about interrogating witnesses, one of whom provides a remarkably clear account of the scene. We learn that Black Tom has whisked Ma Att away through a magic portal in these words, spoken by a neighbor: “Now, I don’t know how else to put this next part, so I’m going to say it like I saw it. Right? She stepped outside, and the Negro stood there patient as you please, and then it was like a door opened. You see, right there were the funeral home gate touchers her property? Something opened right there. I say a door, but I don’t mean a real door. Like a hole, or a pocket, and inside that pocket it was empty, back. I don’t know what else to say. Like the sky at night, but without any stars….” (112) Such passages suffer from too much clarity. When the impossible thing is not treated (by characters, the narrative) as an impossibility, the story tilts into fantasy. This is one reason why atmosphere matters: it helps to establish a credibility that might then be cast into doubt. Here, the neighbor tells Malone what he and we, the readers, expect to find. The portal to inky blackness is rendered as merely the believable unbelievable. In short, the atmosphere dries up in the Malone section, as though the protagonist knows what we know—that we’ve read this story before.
As LaValle speeds through the events narrated in Lovecraft’s story, Black Tom intervenes, changing the narrative. I won’t give away the horror that gets introduced. There’s a good twist, and thoughtful reply to the racism of the original story. But nothing’s particularly weird. Todorov’s distinction between allegorical and weird events provides a useful explanation of why the weirdness dissipates as the novel continues. As Todorov argues, when we read allegorically, we read against a literal interpretation on the words. In unalloyed allegory, such as The Pilgrim’s Progress, the objects of narrative attention are not regarded as real; the Delectable Mountains are not treated as actual mountains, Giant Despair is not a “real” monster. Todorov pursues the relation between allegorical and literal utterances in various tales, showing how sometimes the allegorical interpretation “weakens” the literalism that weirdness requires. Poe’s “William Wilson,” he concludes, effectively produces the weird hesitation between literal and allegorical interpretations—an astute insight into that story’s triangulation of three weird qualities (the primal hesitation, between the presence of a double and the narrator’s madness is synthesized to become one pole in the relation between fantastic and allegorical relations to the text). Gogol’s “The Nose” is his “limit-case”: either the whole thing is impossible literalism or realism at the service of an impossible (absurd) allegory. With this dynamic in mind, it’s interesting to consider how and why LaValle’s antiracist revision of Lovecraft’s story eschews the slower pace of atmospheric realism, which anchors a literal mode of interpretation, as it repeats and modifies the original. I’d postulate that allegory sustains its double meaning by generating correspondences between its metaphors and a canonical text, such as, in Bunyan’s case, 17th century Christian theology. In the strange case of “mythos”-based metafiction, the canonical text is the original story that produced the world in which certain impossible elements may appear. For Verne it’s Poe’s Pym, for LaValle it’s Lovecraft’s “Red Hook.” The former retains its weirdness by accumulating, over hundreds of pages, a literalism that overwhelms the metafictional correspondences, allowing them to become embedded within the text. The first half of LaValle’s novel, set in a kind of “parallel reality”—that constituted by the politics of Black life—sustains some of the literalness, but the final third, focalized on Malone, tips fully into an allegorical rewriting of Lovecraft’s story. Sustaining the affect of weirdness becomes a minor priority as the allegory plays out.
In short, LaValle’s novel is a valuable weird allegory that demonstrates the possibility of antiracist weird fiction, even when written in the Lovecraftian universe. It effectively exposes Lovecraft’s racism; as this subject will continue in the next post, I will conclude by returning us one last time to Lovecraft’s “Red Hook.” In contemporary critical discourse, the defense of Lovecraft’s racism often exaggerates the sense of cosmic “indifference” that he writes about in letters and ruminates on in a few of the tales (most importantly, At the Mountains of Madness). In the “cosmic indifference” reading, the true horror is an existential dread commensurate with a sublime realization of the miniscule place humans occupy in the history of the planet and the universe. That’s part of it; in “Horror at Red Hook,” Lovecraft’s refusal to grant agency to his Celtic cop is an interesting part of the story. But the “Horror” that Malone encounters is not chiefly motivated by a rationalist’s sense of proportion. I’ve wonder what advocates of cosmic indifference make of such passages at this one, from Malone’s dream that was not a dream: “Avenues of limitless night seemed to radiate in every direction, till one might fancy that here lay the root of a contagion destined to sicken and swallow cities, and engulf nations in the foetor of hybrid pestilence. Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us all to fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave’s holding. Satan here held his Babylonish court, [. . .] for in this quintessence of all damnation the bounds of consciousness were let down, and man’s fancy lay open to vistas of every realm of horror and every forbidden dimension that evil had power to mould.” I don’t find much indifference in such passages. “Cosmic sin,” “Satan,” “this quintessence of all damnation,” “every forbidden dimension’? Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones don’t treat the human universe as a mere nothing—they are positively devilish, promising power, the fulfillment of lust, the dance of anarchy, and above (or below) all, the threat of “hybrid pestilence,” which for Lovecraft meant the mixing of the races. This was not a matter of “indifference” to the author of “The Conservative,” Lovecraft’s far-right amateur publication. It was a matter of politics and morality. However, as Richard Wright understood, the weirdness Lovecraft mined, albeit often at the service of his racist antimodernist misanthropy, could be put to other uses. LaValle’s short novel demonstrates this convincingly and with playful winks at the Lovecraftian connoisseurs. The Ballad of Black Tom ends up in allegory, but it remains the best mythic antiracist revision of weird fiction on the market to date.
A longer, but far less convincing, attempt at the same revision motivates the next novel I will review, Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country.
matthiasregan.org 