Horror writer Victor LaValle adds a touch of "cli-fi horror" to the very last page of of his novella "The Ballad of Black Tom"

Victor LaValle, age 44



Victor LaValle’s new novella, The Ballad of Black Tom, is very well written, and interesting in that it is both an homage to H.P. Lovecraft and a refutation of his racism.

Horror writer Victor LaValle adds a touch of "cli-fi horror" to the very last page of of his novella "The Ballad of Black Tom". We learned this the other day while reading a comment by NYC math teacher Michael Pheran @mpershan who wrote a brief comment on Professor Alan Jacob's blog about climate-themed novels.

Michael commented on Oct. 29:

''I recently read a little book by horror writer Victor LaValle. It's mostly about racism, power and horror, but on the very last page it also managed to prompt in me a sense of dread and doom about climate change. Horror is the right genre for how many of us feel about climate change -- that powerful forces that we cannot control have fated us to a terrible future.''

I tweeted him:


@mpershan ''yr comment on dr jacobs blog caught my eye! i just had to find out name of novella and learn more re last page re climate change''

Michael didn't give the title fo the book, so I spent a few minutes Googling to find the author's bio and list of published novels, and one of them seemed to fit the bill: "The Ballad of Black Tom".

I contacted Michael by Twitter and asked him if that was the book he was talking about in that comment, and he replied that yes it was.

He told me in a series of tweets later on:

"It's on the last page. Cthulhu (or some other old one) rises, and as he rises so do the waters and temperatures..."

''...but time for creatures such as Cthulhu is measured in longer scales than human time.''

''It's a very minor touch at the end of a book that's mostly about other things, but it was a nice bit.''

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_LaValle