His horrors hurt, and keep hurting for a good while after the worst seems to be over. As his Lovecraftian novella The Ballad of Black Tom showed just a year ago, he’s not timid either about conjuring horrors or about describing the emotions they evoke in their unfortunate victims. The book’s title hints at the nature of the catastrophe, but doesn’t fully convey the sheer force of it, the gut-punch shock LaValle delivers to his trusting readers.

LaValle’s respect for love and the domestic provides a nice counterpoint to the darkness that threatens to overwhelm these characters, without lessening the threat at the story’s heart. But even if there is no happily ever after here, we can still find a fugitive joy. In such a city, fairy-tale endings no longer work. Nobody is better at combining daily struggles and the supernatural than LaValle, and in helping us understand the convergences between the 99 percent and the things that go bump in the night. That’s been done before.But The Changeling digs deeper, providing subtle commentary about larger issues of computer security, access, and privacy. In addition to invigorating the naturalist novel by infusing it with horror, LaValle introduces contemporary phone and app technology into his increasingly strange story. 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.

The changeling lavalle novel