The Ballad of Black Tom

The Ballad of Black Tom

<p><b>One of <i>NPR</i>'s Best Books of 2016, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, the British Fantasy Award, the This is Horror Award for Novella of the Year, and a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Awards</b></p><p>People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn't there.</p><p>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.</p><p>A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?</p><p>"LaValle's novella of sorcery and skullduggery in Jazz Age New York is a magnificent example of what weird fiction can and should do." <br>― Laird Barron, author of <i>The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All</i></p><p>"[LaValle] reinvents outmoded literary conventions, particularly the ghettos of genre and ethnicity that long divided serious literature from popular fiction."<br>― Praise for <i>The Devil in Silver</i> from Elizabeth Hand, author of <i>Radiant Days</i></p><p> “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, an echo of Lovecraft’s Dagon… [<i>The Ballad of Black Tom</i>] has a satisfying slingshot ending.” – Elizabeth Hand for <i>Fantasy & ScienceFiction</i></p>