What makes this novel so effective is its ability to use genre tropes in a way that doesn’t neglect (or mischaracterize) the race or class or everyday experiences of its protagonists. Nowhere is that clearer than in The Changeling. From the beginning, he has been interested in what the tropes of fantastical fiction can offer when invoked in conjunction with characters like those of his first book: working-class folks, often of color, with a nonprivileged relationship to New York.

( The Changeling features a minor character named Charles Blackwood and a boat called the Merricat-two allusions that have great resonance if you know Shirley Jackson’s work.) But LaValle is also intent on reworking genre fiction in his own particular way. LaValle has a keen awareness of fantastical genre fiction and film, of horror in particular, and his work offers rewards for those with a similar knowledge. Lovecraft, by taking his racist story “The Horror at Red Hook” and reworking it into something else entirely. But LaValle’s novella The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) commits fully and unambiguously to the weird, even as it critiques the weird’s chief figure, H.

You could attribute some of the bizarre moments to the characters’ fraught mental states perhaps, you might think, it’s all in their minds. A little more weirdness came with each book: Big Machine follows a man who, having survived a death-obsessed cult, is recruited, at a bus station, to join what might be called a paranormal investigation squad. Victor LaValle’s first book, Slapboxing with Jesus (1999), offered realistic depictions of working-class young people in the five boroughs, but by his second novel, The Ecstatic (2002), something stranger, if not outright weird, had begun to creep in.

The changeling lavalle novel