{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"","title":"The Ballad of Black Tom: LaValle's Lovecraft Reclamation","thumbnail_width":200,"thumbnail_height":200,"thumbnail_url":"https://open-images.acast.com/shows/6a28001ca917ce4c7065c483/e29dfc78-6778-4abf-8473-eb180855291e.jpg?height=200","description":"Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) is a retelling of H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Horror at Red Hook' from the perspective of Charles Thomas 'Tommy' Tester, a Black hustler in 1920s Harlem. Tommy uses a guitar case as a prop — it grants him 'invisibility' among wealthy white folks and their cops — but he is primarily a street hustler and con man, not a musician (his father is the talented musician). Lovecraft's original story is saturated with racial terror — Lovecraft was explicitly, virulently racist, and his cosmic horror is inseparable from his fear of non-white people. LaValle's response is not to ignore the racism but to inhabit it: his protagonist experiences the actual cosmic horror of being Black in America, and the Lovecraftian monsters are less frightening than the police. The novella asks what it means to reclaim a racist text, whether that reclamation is possible or even desirable, and how the horror genre's relationship with race must be reckoned with. This episode examines LaValle's project, Lovecraft's racism, and the broader movement of writers of color reclaiming and transforming the horror and SF genres.","author_name":"Atween Studios"}