Victor LaValle doesn’t rehabilitate HP Lovecraft; he takes all the good, sheds the malevolent dreck, and adds to the horror a heart and depth that HPL never managed to find. The Ballad of Black Tom (on B&N and Amazon) is a far better imagining of HPL’s The Horror at Red Hook; it has a humanity to it that Lovecraft couldn’t write, and is in every way a superior story.

LaValle uses the story of a young black man to artfully tie the everyday horror of injustice, and humanity’s easy inhumanity, to the overarching themes of cosmic horror and the pursuit of power. He does so while retaining the wonder and strangeness of HPL’s more evocative works, even as he roundly and repeatedly critiques HPL’s own prejudices both implicitly and explicitly. This story is a treat.

If you ever found any redeeming quality in a story by Lovecraft, any frisson of horror that moved you, I suggest that you read this book. If you steered clear of HPL’s work because of its noxious toxicity, but are willing to give horror with heart a try, I recommend this book a hundred times over.

It’s a shame that so much of cosmic horror is tied to HPL these days. HPL’s large collection of ‘-isms’ are so inextricably tied into his stories that they are themselves a source of horror. But Robert W. Chambers wrote cosmic horror before him (with The King in Yellow), and The Ballad of Black Tom is proof that there’s good cosmic horror after him. I’m glad to have a story I can wholeheartedly recommend which doesn’t cover or ignore HPL’s awfulness, but instead acknowledges and rejects it completely.

If you want more other stories like this, there’s a collection of four novellas (including The Ballad of Black Tom) called Reimagining Lovecraft. I haven’t read the other stories yet, but I will soon.