A Tale of Two Red Hooks

Abstract

A Tale of Two Red Hooks: LaValle’s Rewriting of Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” in The Ballad of Black Tom. This article analyses and compares the representations of the monster in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” (1927) and Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (2016), the latter being a rewriting of the former, both rooted in the Weird tale. The aim of this article is to illuminate the process through which LaValle turns Lovecraft’s narrative into one where racism becomes evident. The framework for this analysis is Cohen’s “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” (1996), which argues that monsters are bodies of text that have an iterative nature; each iteration adds new layers of meaning to the monstrous body. Whereas Lovecraft’s text arouses racist fears, LaValle’s analyses how these fears turn the racial other into a monster.

Keywords

• h. p. lovecraft
• victor lavalle
• monster
• the horror at red hook
• the ballad of black tom