Description

One of NPR 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 People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn t there. 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. A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break? LaValle s novella of sorcery and skullduggery in Jazz Age New York is a magnificent example of what weird fiction can and should do.
— Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All [LaValle] reinvents outmoded literary conventions, particularly the ghettos of genre and ethnicity that long divided serious literature from popular fiction.
— Praise for The Devil in Silver from Elizabeth Hand, author of Radiant Days 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… [The Ballad of Black Tom] has a satisfying slingshot ending. – Elizabeth Hand for Fantasy & ScienceFiction