The Ballad of Black Tom By Victor LaValle (Grades 10+)

The dedication to Victor LaValle's Shirley Jackson Award-winning novella The Ballad of Black Tom reads, "For H.P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings". Lovecraft casts a long shadow over horror and fantasy literature, influencing nearly every genre writer that came after him. He was also a white-supremacist, a fact that infects all of his work, and his writing has faced something a reckoning in recent years. Some of this response has been in the form of other novels, as in Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country and in this novel, which interrogates Lovecraft's racism and inverts those tropes, all while capturing the eerie awfulness of his horrifying imagination.