Holy forking shirtballs, this book was amazing!
LaValle's mix of fairy tale and slow existential parenting horror is exquisite. He has a ridiculous command of both genres and understands exactly how to situate the supernatural into the natural.
That’s not the main narrative dichotomy, although it’s an important one, and it folds into the dialectic tensions that LaValle sets up between mediated and unmediated ways of knowing, digital versus print, contemporary versus old school, and real versus unreal.
This isn’t a polemic against technology, although some of the creeping existential horror takes the form of who has access to your data and your children, nor is it a metaphor for the way that whiteness destroys young black boys, although the story—like all good fairy tales—understands the way in which it functions as a warning, nor is it even a parable for post-partum depression and the people parents turn into after having children. It’s not any of those things; it’s a glorious urban fairy tale about parents’ worst fears and modern monsters. But it is also those things and that is what makes the fairy tale so good.
Also,

The slippage between the actual troll and the internet troll is perfect.