To get by, New York’s Charles Thomas Tester runs short cons and plays the only three songs he has on his set list. With his mom in the grave, and his father so close to being there, it’s all he can do to keep a roof overhead. He takes an odd job delivering an arcane manuscript to the mysterious Ma Att. He plays it cool when he speaks to the woman shadowed in a doorway, despite the fact that he has hidden the last page of the book at home in his guitar case. She won’t let him in her front door, fearing what the neighbors would say about a “negro” entering her home.
The Ballad of Black Tom starts as a tentative love letter to H.P. Lovecraft’s writing style, and ends as a triumphant novel on behalf of the marginalized people of the world. Author Victor LaValle has even dedicated the novella to “H.P. Lovecraft with all my conflicted feelings.”
The Ballad of Black Tom is one of those rare occurrences where an homage to Lovecraft doesn’t overemphasize the Lovecraft elements to the detriment of the story. Too often, modern writers use creatures and characters directly from the original texts, rather than hint heavily or play with the shadows instead.
The book is also careful to use the role of skin color for plot, and not in a way that devalues its power. Black Tom goes through hell, but he is sympathetic and interesting enough to stand on his own as a character and not just as a stand-in for the suffering of African Americans. We are deeply interested in his story, but don’t feel like we have to rely on his ethnicity as his only key feature.
LaValle’s writing has a blend of mystery and bloodshed, tinged with the darker powers of a world just outside our own. His storytelling is strong enough to grab the reader by the throat, shake them down, and keep them wanting more all the way to the end. I found myself reading this entire book in one session with a quick break for food. If I love a book enough to carry it with me to the restroom, you know it’s good.
Dirge Magazine spoke with Victor LaValle to find out his inspirations behind the work.
Dirge: Lovecraft’s racism being well documented, the “conflicted feelings” with which you dedicated your book are understandable. While reading and writing, how do you separate the man from the mythos?
Victor LaValle: I wouldn’t want to separate the guy from his writing, in fact I think one of the things that makes him great is that he couldn’t make the distinction, either. I mean to say that his stories are often works of fiction where some characters do a bunch of things then one of them, generally, goes insane with evil wisdom (or what have you).
But his stories also read like concentrated doses of his world view, you know? The man was scared of everything. SCARED OF LIFE: The biography of H.P. Lovecraft! He feared non-white people. He feared poor white people. He feared women. He damn sure feared New York City. And yet, to his credit, he actually transferred that sense of horror to the page. He couldn’t filter it out and that’s one of the things that made him great. If I lost that I’d lose the thing that makes him a singular artist. The generations of lesser writers who imitated him are the perfect example of what’s leeched out when you only mimic the style or the creatures. August Derleth, I’m looking at you!
What are some of your world views that you feel are concentrated in your works? Do you see growing up in Queens coming through how you write?
I grew up in a wildly paranoid household and sometimes I fall into that trap myself. The problem with paranoia is that you believe the world is out to get you when, of course, the world couldn’t give a fuck. The first drafts of my earlier writing pretty much dripped with the stuff. There were grand conspiracies afoot. The universe as a whole conspired to a single end. And that end was to destroy a heavyset, black loser from Queens! Good God. To my great good luck I was willing to listen to criticism so the conspiracies might stay in the work, but less of the self-importance. (A little less.)
As for Queens, it’s all over the place. Most of all in the way I populate the world. People from every corner of the planet show up in my work, not as a point of pride but as something pretty matter-of-fact. Flushing, Queens, where I grew up, was the most diverse neighborhood on the planet in the 1980s but I realize now it was really more like a time machine. Flushing simply looked like America would in the 21st century. That’s the biggest Queens influence. It helped me to write the United States as it is right now.
In The Ballad of Black Tom one of these grand conspiracies appears to gather the most diverse neighborhoods of New York. How did you prepare to write the details of Robert Sudyam’s master plan?
Actually this part was the easiest detail in the novel. I inferred most of Suydam’s plan straight from the Lovecraft story. The deeper details weren’t there–about the astral travel to the Outside and that kind of stuff–but the parts about Suydam gathering the underworld of Red Hook and all kinds of mystical rites being performed were right there in Lovecraft. Come to think of it, those details are right there in almost every Lovecraft story.
Many of your books deal with mental illness and man-made horrors. In The Devil In Silver you have a bison-headed old man attack. What were some of the differences in creating an homage to literary creatures already in existence?
Lovecraft had already done so much of the heavy lifting that I only had to come in a nudge the monsters a bit in a new direction. Really, I think that’s one of the reasons so many people have written “Lovecraftian” stories for so many years. He was doing some Tolkien type of work but where Tolkien’s work is like a complete program, sold as a closed system, Lovecraft’s universe is more like open code. It’s wonderful.
As a writer, would you rather create a world that is more like Tolkien’s complete program, leave a more “open code” legacy like Lovecraft, or more like a combination of the two?
Actually, the world I like–maybe because I grew up with him as my first big influence–is a world like Stephen King’s work creates. I like his version because there isn’t just one version, you know? He’s got the books in Castle Rock, the books in Derry, the books set in farther flung places (like The Shining in Colorado or even Duma Key out in Florida and Minnesota) but then there’s the Dark Tower series which is a whole alternate universe. And yet characters from one place will find their way into another. It’s not one universe but three or four. I love that. Lots of gaps in between the stories for “tribute” fiction when the man is no longer writing but here’s hoping that won’t be for a long time still.
Do you have anything you’d like to say to newer horror writers and publishers?
To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell’s heart I stab at thee; For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee!
Also, I hope you enjoy the shit out of my book.
The Ballad of Black Tom is available from Tor Books February 16, 2016 and available for preorder now.
Victoria Irwin
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