Tester is approached by a rich white man named Robert Suydam, who offers to pay Tester an exorbitant amount of money to play guitar at his party, and becomes ensnared in a supernatural mystery that leads him to the edge of reality. The novel tells the story of Tommy Tester, a hustler living in 1920s Harlem who makes ends meet by dealing in shadowy, occult-related artifacts. Running a brisk 150 pages, The Ballad of Black Tom is published by speculative publisher Tor Books and edited by Ellen Datlow, who has edited science fiction, fantasy, and horror for more than three decades. Black Tom is LaValle’s fifth book, and follows two critically successful novels, Big Machine and The Devil in Silver, both edited by Chris Jackson at Spiegel and Grau and enriched by otherworldly phenomena. With his new book, The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle has brilliantly bridged this divide. John Mandel have fused their fiction with themes and styles from earlier masters of the speculative form. “Genre” writers like Neil Gaiman, Jeff VanderMeer, and Brian Evenson have won the respect of the literary establishment, while “literary” writers like Kazuo Ishiguro, Chang-rae Lee and Emily St. The distinction between “literary” and “genre” fiction has blurred over the last few years. The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
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