Bookish Thoughts

The Ballad of Black Tom  was Tor.com's free download back in October. I'd been hearing good things about Victor LaValle for years ( The Changeling  is currently sitting on my shelf waiting to be read), and besides, who can say no to free? So I downloaded it. But it took me a while to get around to reading it. The thing is, this novella is a direct response to one of HP Lovecraft's stories: "The Horror at Red Hook". And I really meant to read that one first. It's available for free on line and I even have a copy in a collection of Lovecraft's work at home. But I never quite got around to it. It's widely considered the most overtly racist piece of work by a horrifically racist author. And who wants to read a story with an endorsement like that? I ended up skimming this article about the original story and then dove in to LaValle's response. I really ought to have actually read Lovecraft's original story first. The Ballad of Black Tom  is suc...

Going into this book, I had a lot of meta information. The author released the entire trilogy in one year. There's a movie coming out next month. It has an all-female cast. Weird shit happens. But I didn't know a ton about the book itself. That ended up being a good thing. I'm not entirely sure I would have picked this book up on it's own, or at least been as eager as I was to read it. I would have had all these preconceived notions about what it was and I would have shied away, always reaching for something else. As it is, I ended up enjoying this book a lot. It wasn't until I was almost done with it that I made the connection to Lovecraft. When the biologist finally confronts the Crawler, I was very strongly reminded of the handful of Lovecraft stories I read several years ago. The eldritch horror that the mind cannot even comprehend was a signature of his, and I was excited to see it pop up again in modern literature. It turns out that there's some of a...