The Ballad of Black Tom

The Ballad of Black Tom is a horror novella by the American writer Victor LaValle, published in 2016. It is a retelling of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook", told from the perspective of a Black man, and it won a Shirley Jackson Award and a British Fantasy Award.

The setting is New York in the 1920s. Charles Thomas Tester, known as Tommy, lives in Harlem and gets by on odd jobs, running errands and busking with his guitar. One errand has him carrying an occult book to a woman in Queens, and before the delivery he secretly removes the final page so the book cannot be used.

A wealthy older man named Robert Suydam hears Tommy playing and hires him to play at a party at his Flatbush home. The job draws the attention of a police inspector and a private detective, and it places Tommy between the ordinary racism of the city and the far older powers that Suydam is trying to reach.

The novella is divided in two, the first half following Tommy and the second following the detective who has been tracking him. LaValle wrote it as both a tribute to Lovecraft and a reply to him, handing the story to the people his original treated as background.