ABSTRACT

Victor LaValle takes as inspiration for his 2016 horror novella The Ballad of Black Tom  H.P. Lovecraft’s virulently racist short story “The Horror at Red Hook” (1927) while also referencing the Cthulhu Mythos throughout. In doing so, LaValle offers his audience a new way of reading Lovecraft as a problematic yet still incredibly popular author, inviting readers to first acknowledge the narrative gaps and violent fractures caused by systemic racism, and then apply Lovecraft’s own examinations of cosmic indifference and “abcanny” interventions to discourses of racial visibility and invisibility. “Racial (in)visibility, cosmic indifference: Reimagining H.P. Lovecraft’s legacy in Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom” compares narrative strategies, descriptions of racial identity, and the rise of the abhuman in both LaValle and Lovecraft’s stories, shedding light on how Lovecraft’s work may be deconstructed and repurposed to speak to contemporary political and social moments. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” showcases a racially charged universe which defies attempts at containment and authoritative “readings” of Black bodies, rendering them unknowable and abcanny. In prioritizing and empathizing with the Black experience within his own recognizable Lovecraftian tale, LaValle, in turn, reworks this project to address instances of police violence against Black communities and bodies and offer new, constructive interpretations of what it means to be “human.”