Roundtable on "Conflicted Feelings, Resilient Responses: Rewriting Marginalization in the Gothic"
Victor LaValle dedicated his 2016 horror novella The Ballad of Black Tom, a work that reimagines a racially-charged Lovecraftian universe by centering it around the Black experience, “To H.P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings”. LaValle’s ambiguous feelings as both a reader and author are shared by many students of the Gothic as they adjust recognizable and occasionally exclusive generic boundaries to better encompass varied, eclectic, and sometimes invisible or problematically visible identities.