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The Ballad of Black Tom
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The Ballad of Black Tom

By: Victor LaValle
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Brought to you by Penguin.

People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn't there.

Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops.
But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic and earns the attention of things best left sleeping.

A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?

© Victor LaValle 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

 20th Century African American Historical Fiction
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Critic reviews

This ingenious recasting of an H.P. Lovecraft classic is as creepy as it is thought-provoking.
The Ballad of Black Tom stands on its own as a compelling weird tale of Jazz-age New York City, but its penetrating examination of Lovecraft’s creations and how they reflect racism’s profound influence on our cultural imagination is where it really shines.
Ingenious... darkly witty... The writing is full of rage and passion: love for the vanished culture of 1920s Harlem and love — conflicted — for crazy Lovecraft.
LaValle's novella of sorcery and skullduggery in Jazz Age New York is a magnificent example of what weird fiction can and should do.
Holds all the horror of the cosmic void that has made the Lovecraft mythos such an enduring cultural artifact, placing it deftly amid the very real terrors of life for a young black man in a racist society.
LaValle cleverly subverts Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos by imbuing a black man with the power to summon the Old Ones, and creates genuine chills with his evocation of the monstrous Sleeping King.
LaValle has taken Lovecraft’s most notorious tale and reframed it for us as an even more horrifying story, exceptionally well-written with the utmost attention to detail... The horrors of the story are both real and imagined for the reader, as we confront racism head-first with some nasty dealings in the arcane arts designed to wake up the sleeping ‘Elder Gods’.
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