People proceed to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn’t there.

Charles Thomas Tester hustles to place food up for grabs, keep the roof more than his father’s head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Crimson Hook. He understands what magic a fit can cast, the invisibility a electric guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his black skin that draws in the attention of wealthy white folks and their qualified cops. However when he delivers an occult web page to a reclusive sorceress in the heart about The Ballad of Black Tom of Queens, Tom opens a door to a much deeper realm of magic, and earns the interest of things best left sleeping.

A storm that might swallow the globe is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?

“LaValle cleverly subverts Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos by imbuing a black man with the power to summon the Old Ones, and creates real chills along with his evocation of the monstrous Sleeping Ruler, an echo of Lovecraft’s Dagon… [The Ballad of Black Tom] includes a satisfying slingshot finishing.” – Elizabeth Hand for Fantasy & ScienceFiction

‘[LaValle] reinvents outmoded literary conventions, specially the ghettos of genre and ethnicity that lengthy divided serious literature from well-known fiction.’

–Compliment for The Devil in Silver from Elizabeth Hand, author of Radiant Days