Close Analysis Essay: Comparison & Contrast – ” The Horror at Red Hook” and The Ballad of Black Tom

While H.P. Lovecraft’s powerful influence on the world of speculative fiction cannot be denied, neither can the deep and disturbing ways in which his well-known racism, sexism, and xenophobia shaped both his worldview and his writing. In recent years, several authors have engaged directly with Lovecraftian “cosmic horror” by reimagining its established tropes and underlying ideologies. Victor Lavalle’s novella The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) retells one of Lovecraft’s most notorious stories, “The Horror at Red Hook” (1927), by centering a Black protagonist as well as performing other dynamic character, narrative, and ideological reorientations. Your goal is to write an essay that helps tease out some of these interventions and that thinks through whether and how we can contend with Lovecraft’s fraught legacy in generative ways.