Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsDeus Ex Mari
Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2021
On the whole, I very much enjoyed this novella, but felt it hit a sour note at its end. Other reviewers have suggested that this should have been a full novel, and that may be the best way to encapsulate the conclusion.
The first third of the book does a great job introducing Charles Thomas Tester, our protagonist, as an evocative, intelligent, sympathetic citizen of New York. He is a "hustler" in the 1920's, which is presented very well here as a mixture of stage guitarist, busker, and courier. Tester is a black man who has to deal with all the pressures of an America four decades prior to any real civil rights legislation. LaValle's description of Tommy wins me over almost right away. I am entirely on Tommy's side and his friends and family, while less fully described, are equally evocative. This is a good, smart person making his way within a hard system that undervalues him. We get a few, enticing hints of magic and supernatural threats, but all are fairly understated at first. Still, the tone of magic realism is very well set, so we can expect any future weirdness to be stitched into the fabric of the story without any large physical, or metaphysical framework being described. In this first third of the novella, LaValle has won me over completely, and I can't wait to learn Tommy's story.
The next third of the novel spends time with two supporting characters. First is Malone (who is the protagonist of the original Lovecraft story "The Horror at Red Hook"). In Lovecraft's original, overtly xenophobic tale, Malone is a driving force to "attempt a general cleanup" of all the "swarthy, evil-looking strangers." LaValle could have taken the easy route and made Malone the paper-thin racist that Lovecraft seemed to intend him to be, but instead LaValle casts Malone as a sensitive detective, an educated man who thinks before he acts, a man who sees things and people (especially Tommy Tester) in the full light of their complexities and abilities. Again this makes me appreciate LaValle's character building and wins me over as a supporter of Malone. It also makes me think the conflict of the novella may be much more complicated than good vs. evil, sanity vs. insanity, domestic vs. foreign, or any of the other simplistic dichotomies present in the Lovecraft original. LaValle is showing subtlety here. He also, in this second portion of the book, describes the character Suydam, who is closer to the sorcerer originally described by Lovecraft, but is also better fleshed-out by LaValle, showing a healthy fear of the otherworldly powers at play behind the scenes of the story. Suydam, like Malone, demonstrates both intelligence and a respect for Tommy Tester as a person with natural talent for seeing the magic underpinning the world around them all. At this point I am rubbing my hands together waiting to see how these complex characters are going to collide!
We also, in developments throughout the beginning and middle of the book, get increasingly more explicit glimpses "Outside" (into the realm of magic swimming around the tamer setting of the 1920's). LaValle pulls off a very cool trick by interweaving the Supreme Alphabet and other concepts of the Nation of Gods and Earths (a real-life cultural movement from 1964, worth looking up for some context). While this is arguably anachronistic (the NOGE was founded in 1964), LaValle does it very smoothly. The Supreme Alphabet is presented as a cosmic truth in the novel, rather than the doctrine of any particular movement. We also see increasing racism in the setting as the story moves along. This is legitimate considering both the setting (~1920's) and the fact that this novella is a counterpoint to Lovecraft's original anti-"swarthy" tirade. Sadly, the racism on display in this story, ubiquitous although not usually outrageously flagrant, would still be fairly believable in a ~2020 setting, and the social commentary of this is both unmistakable and very timely. LaValle is turning up the temperature under both the supernatural and the racist undertones of the story, tying us into both popular mythology as well as current social pressures, doing a great job pulling us toward what promises to be a terrific climax.
So we sail into the final third of the novella with a great protagonist, a handful of very evocative supporting characters, and at least two lit plot fuses... time for the reckoning! Sadly, this is where the novella is forced through a too-sharp turn and jumps off the rails. It is still headed more or less the right direction, and still grinds to a fairly satisfying conclusion, but the disconnect between the setup and conclusion is a huge jolt that, unfortunately, breaks much of what was so well put in place during the previous chapters. Without spoilers, one of our characters faces a personal tragedy (and terrible injustice) that would be crushing to any person. Since LaValle has given us good reasons to connect with all of the main characters, this would be a perfect opportunity to pull us into personal conflicts and soul-searching. This would also likely be the best place to inject many more chapters and transform this novella into a full novel. Unfortunately, none of that exposition exists at all. Instead, all the characters (even those who haven't suffered personally) change behavior drastically and almost instantly. All the depth built up earlier vanishes, and every character quickly becomes a self-caricature. Also, the titular Black Tom now appears and almost immediately ascends from interesting enigma to become a Gary Stu, an all-powerful force with impenetrable plot armor. Black Tom single-handedly alters the whole course of the narrative while saying very little except to opine that all white folks are devils (which, though seemingly untrue for the first two-thirds of the novel, has sadly now been enforced within the final chapters) and to assert that the destruction of all humans is likely preferable to the existence of even a few racist ones.
These plot points are defensible. The "white devils" concept was very popular during the 60's and surely in the foreground of the creation of the NOGE (and so, part of the existing Supreme Alphabet tie-in), but it does still take away from the impact of the novella as a whole. Until this point the novella seemed to counter Lovecraft's racism/xenophobia with elegant characters who win us over to their sides. So, it is painful to see them all now reduced to one-dimensioners and one-liners in a forced, strawman conflict, even if that does minimally satisfy the requirements of the tragic plot. We can also choose to interpret Black Tom's nihilism as the true "horror" of this tale -- that is, that human society is so irredeemable that its destruction by "Outside" forces is only right. This is also arguably a valid (and clearly horrifying) conclusion for a horror novella to be drawing, but are horror and hopelessness really the same thing? Couldn't these excellent characters have been used as-developed, without being turned into simplifications of themselves, to show real peril being deflected by true cleverness and diligence (instead of simple plot armor), real consequences being paid for pre-judgements (instead of just standing up klansmen and knocking them down like bowling pins), and humans, all humans however weak and petty, finding a way to stand together for sanity and humanity against the overwhelming threat of insanity and destruction from Outside (instead of simply heading off to their mutual, apparently well earned destruction)?
LaValle was certainly right to disregard, contextualize, and/or parody Lovecraft's original (borderline inexcusable) xenophobia. And LaValle did this beautifully, with great wit and introspection. But he then threw the baby out with the bathwater when, in a few hurried paragraphs, he transformed all of his believable, well-developed, humane characters into automatons, subsequently using their deus-ex-machina inhumanity as evidence that homo sapiens itself is a lost cause.
TL;DR
The Ballad of Black Tom is a good novella with excellent characters and certainly worth the few hours needed to read it. I couldn't put it down. It's just jarring to read through the ending without thinking about how much better it could have been if the rich characters so well developed by LaValle had not been, so quickly and without believable explanation, turned into paper dolls for an apocalyptic shadow play denouement.
