A Tale of Two Red Hooks
LaValle’s Rewriting of Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” in The Ballad of Black Tom
Keywords:
H. P. Lovecraft, Victor LaValle, Monster, The Horror at Red Hook, The Ballad of Black TomAbstract
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.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2019 Fafnir

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Content in Fafnir is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 3.0).
Beginning in November 2019, authors retain full copyright without restrictions. By publishing with Fafnir, authors grant a non-exclusive license to Fafnir to distribute the publisher’s version of the work, and give Fafnir permission to grant reprint and/or translation requests in accordance with our open-access policy and our Creative Commons license.
Prior to November 2019, copyright for all published material is held by Fafnir, but authors have full permission to use their work as they wish (i.e., self-archiving, reprint requests, using for other projects, etc.).
In both cases, re-use or re-posting of material published in Fafnir must acknowledge original publication and include a link to the publisher version.