By the Book: Book Club February 2022 - The Ballad of Black Tom

Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom revisits H.P. Lovecraft's short story The Horror at Red Hook, but from the point of view of a young black man living in 1920s New York. Far from being a straightforward tribute, the novella is instead an interrogation of Lovecraft's complicated legacy, taking on the racism present in the horror writer's work and flipping it in clever, complex, and sobering ways. We review the book and discuss how it manages to pack so much within its compact space. Then in Footnotes, we talk about looking at old books through new eyes.