2019 Book Resolution: The Ballad of Black Tom, The Dream Cycle, The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe

[tablesaw]

As mentioned in the last post, the other part of my resolution is to read books. Any books. I haven't been reading, people; it's just been a lot of TV.

Another aspect of this resolution is that I asked for and received an e-reader for Christmas, so I want to be sure that I'm actually getting use out of it, and that it doesn't become a toy that I have just to feel more like a person who is actually reading books even when I'm not.

January was dedicated to Lovecraftiana. I read The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle and The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson (both available as part of the e-book bundle Reimagining Lovecraft: For Tor.com Novellas). In between, I read the Lovecraft stories known as the Dream Cycle, including The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

The Ballad of Black Tom

I was really inspired to read this after listening to an episode of the Waypoints podcast. I'd downloaded it because I wanted to hear them talk about Channel Zero: The Dream Door, which I also liked (see, too much tv!), and the discussion really piqued my interest, in a thankfully non-spoilery way.

The Ballad of Black Tom is a reimagining of one of Lovecraft's most explicitly racist stories, and takes a black New Yorker as its main protagonist. It should come as no surprise that LaValle's work greatly exceeds Lovecraft's original, but what surprised me most is the deftness with which he managed the scope of his cosmic horror. Where Lovecraft often pulled out to talk about horrific abstractions, LaValle grounds a surprisingly large story in very small details and builds out to a shocking climax. LaValle also manages to add a line to the Cthulhu Mythos as resonant and chilling as any of Lovecraft's.

The Dream Cycle

In preparation for Johnson's book, I decided to read Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, none of which I'd read before. I've read a number of Lovecraft's stories, but I focused on the Mythos stories that take a more science-fictional take on horror in more modern settings. The Dream Cycle is a series of fantasy stories that all take place in a loosely connected setting called "The Dreamlands."

I really enjoyed a lot of these stories, which helped fill in the gaps, for me, between Lovecraft and some of his pulp peers like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. The prose was appropriately dreamlike, following strange desires through strange vistas, and hinting at the mystic just a step away from our own reality. The way earth's gods and the other gods are described in the Dreamlands helps to explain a bit about the strange creatures of the Mythos. But while Lovecraft's narration worked very well for me in most of these short stories, they really failed for me in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

Dream-Quest is a strange read in a lot of ways. For one, it's largely comprised of callbacks to Lovecraft's previous stories, and not just the ones in the Dream Cycle. Moreover, the style of descriptive prose that works well for a short story can wear thin in a novella that's mostly just a succession of vignettes with no clear story arc. Midway through the novella I realized I wasn't enjoying myself, and rather than poison my new reading habit any further, I pulled the plug on Dream-Quest and moved on to, well, Dream-Quest.

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

I've enjoyed Johnson's short stories (including "Spar" and "Ponies") on podcasts I've listened to, so I was looking forward to this one (looking forward enough to drive me to skip the rest of my Lovecraft assignment to get to it). Johnson's Dream-Quest inverts Lovecraft's stories in many ways, centering on a woman of the Dreamlands, instead of a man from our "Waking World." Vellitt Boe is a mathematics teacher at a women's college, who takes it upon herself to retrieve a student who left for the waking world with a dreamer on his own quest.

Like LaValle, Johnson exceeds Lovecraft's prose, drawing vivid characters where there were once only pallid allegories. But where LaValle is working with Lovecraft's views on our world, Johnson ends up working within the scope of Lovecraft's imagined world. Ultimately, this allows Johnson to comment on the limitations of Lovecraft's imagination itself. Boe lives in a world limned by cruel, capricious, and spiteful gods, and Johnson vividly realizes the life of a woman born inside the mind of a misogynist.

There are two more novellas in the Tor bundle, but as we got into February, things got very stressful, so I decided to pivot away from Horror. But that'll have to wait until next month (which is, you know, a few days from now).

Comments

[elusis]

Ballad of Black Tom was great. I am doing Tempest's revised challenge for February (read stuff by Black people that isn't about slavery, the Civil War, or the Civil Rights movement) so I read LaValle's "Changeling" which was the very definition of "a real page turner" even if I was reading it on the Kindle.

[tablesaw]

I'm really interested in reading more from LaValle once I've gotten through a credible amount of my backlog this year.