Tommy Tester is a young Black man attempting to make a living on the streets of New York in the 1920s. Though he carries a guitar case everywhere he goes, his main job is tracking down obscure items for anyone whose willing to pay him for the work. Until he meets Robert Suydam, a rich gentleman who hires Tommy to play the guitar at a gathering of the diverse residents of Red Hook, Brooklyn. It turns out, however, that Suydam has nebulous plans to use these people to appease the "sleeping king" and gain supernatural power.
LaValle based this novella on the 1927 H.P. Lovecraft short story "The Horror at Red Hook," which has been called Lovecraft's "most racist" story (which is really saying something). But where Lovecraft made the undocumented immigrants and Black residents of Red Hook into a monolithic "other," LaValle gave them character and variation and brought them to life. Neither the short story nor the novella make a whole lot of sense (particularly in the second half), but it's easy to see how LaValle's story reckons with Lovecraft's racism and the way that being treated like a monster is what makes someone a monster. It made for an illuminating Orcs & Aliens discussion last night.
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