Last year I listened to Lovecraft's The Horror At Red Hook on audio for the first time and was astonished at the morass of swelering, bubbling, primitive racism, the sort of feverish imagining of what vile but titillating spectacles and sordid doings that non-white bodies and non-white minds get up to as they cavorted energetically but also lounged with dull brute laziness in their teeming ghettos. I felt... weird afterwards, but I'm glad now, because The Ballad Of Black Tom turns the narrative of The Horror Of Red Hook inside out, and explores the voyeuristic racism of fantasising what The Other is getting up to when you;re not looking, but also effectively twists the horrors of racism and the supernatural horrors of Lovecraft together in a gordian knot, then slices right through them with one stroke.