Race, Crowds, and Resistance in Lovecraft's Country: From Poe's Old Old Weird to Victor LaValle's New Black Gothic.

This article analyzes Victor LaValle’s 2016 horror novella *The Ballad of Black Tom* as a critical response to H. P. Lovecraft’s 1927 story "The Horror at Red Hook," itself influenced by Edgar Allan Poe’s 1840 tale "The Man of the Crowd." LaValle’s novella centers on Tommy Tester, a Black Harlem hustler who gains occult powers to challenge racist violence and cosmic horror, thereby reclaiming agency denied in Lovecraft’s xenophobic narrative. The essay situates these works within a lineage of American literary depictions of racialized crowds, highlighting how Poe’s story grapples with the unreadability and racial anxiety of urban masses, Lovecraft’s story racializes immigrant populations as monstrous threats, and LaValle’s work transforms the crowd into a site of Black resistance and complex identity. Framing *The Ballad of Black Tom* within the "New Black Gothic," the article emphasizes its transhistorical critique of systemic racism and its subversion of genre conventions to expose enduring racial violence and the possibilities of collective revolt. [Extracted from the article]