Victor LaValle's 'Black Tom' tops a Guardian genre review roundup

Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom — a 2016 novella that swept nearly every major genre award — headlines a Guardian review roundup of recent science fiction, fantasy and horror. Penguin now reissues the book at £9.99.

What does LaValle's novella actually do?

The short novel recasts H.P. Lovecraft's The Horror at Red Hook, one of the most overtly racist stories in the Lovecraft canon. LaValle, a Black writer, has spoken about his complicated bond with the older author's work.

As a child he loved the cosmic-horror tales, but he grew to recognise the racism and other prejudices baked into them. LaValle has said he could not "throw the man's stories away" because the tales had been formative to his own imagination, so he wrote his own response instead.

The result, the reviewer writes, is a powerful tale of everyday and occult horror told with "sheer brilliance." The book centres on a 1920s Harlem musician and hustler who comes to be called Black Tom, and it shifts the perspective from Lovecraft's white protagonists to a Black one.

What's the mechanism behind Chambers's non-linear romance?

As You Wake, Break the Shell (Hodderscape, £22) is Becky Chambers's new cosy science-fiction love story. It is set on a distant planet where human colonists struggle to survive.

Botanist Signy is yet to meet her future wife Cora, a rorqual pilot. Rorquals are gigantic interplanetary creatures, trained by human pilots whose implants allow them to communicate with the beasts as they transport supplies.

The book opens with chapter 1, then jumps to chapter 764, set more than a decade later, when the two women are blissfully married. The reviewer suggests the non-linear structure may mirror the rorquals' view of time, but says it also strips out much suspense.

The characters are "adorable," and the details of growing plants in an artificial environment, plus Cora's relationship with her rorqual, are enjoyable. Even the "naturally solitary" rorqual declares its love for Cora, which undercuts the animal's stated temperament.

Readers may grow impatient with the glacial pace and the book's reiterations of the women's feelings for each other, the review notes. The final pages bring a tonal shift, and the book ends on a cliffhanger. How Cora and Signy survive is to be revealed in a sequel.

What about the rest of the slate?

The Guardian pairs two more titles with LaValle and Chambers:

• The Eye of Goliath by Diego Muzzio
• Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm

The available excerpt does not detail the reviews of those two books.

So what does this roundup actually change for genre readers?

It pushes LaValle's award-winning Black response to Lovecraft back into paperback circulation at £9.99, six years after its US debut. It also positions Chambers as a working author with a sequel already in motion, and flags a fan question worth tracking: how Cora and Signy survive their cliffhanger.

The other two titles — Muzzio's The Eye of Goliath and Helm's Our Cut of Salt — arrive without detail in this excerpt. Genre readers will need to consult the full Guardian review to weigh those two against LaValle and Chambers.