“I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day”: refiguring anti-Black monstrosity in “The Horror at Red Hook” through The Ballad of Black Tom

This essay examines H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” and Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom to explore how anti-Black violence and colonial desire constitute the conditions of possibility for weird horror. Drawing from theories of anti-Blackness, social death, and racial monstrosity, we argue that LaValle’s novella refigures Lovecraft’s racist constructions of Otherness by placing Blackness as both the site and revelation of horror in civil society. Where Lovecraft identifies immigrants and Black bodies as the cause of “strange egress” and cosmological disruption, LaValle locates the origins of horror in the colonial desire to master and exploit the Other and articulates Blackness as a mode of critique. Through this inversion, The Ballad illuminates the weird affective potentiality of anti-Black violence, revealing how speculative horror relies upon the same logics that structure anti-Black social death. By linking the “weird” to lived experiences of racialized terror, the essay situates LaValle’s rewriting as an immanent critique of speculative horror and its underlying racial assumptions, offering a framework for understanding monstrosity as a mode of defiant subjectivity against the symbolic order of whiteness.