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The Ballad of Black Tom
- Narrated by: Kevin R. Free
- Length: 3 hrs and 9 mins
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Enter the world of the Pendleton: The original owner became a recluse - and was rumored to be more than half mad - after his wife and two children were kidnapped in 1896 and never found. The second owner suffered a worse tragedy in 1935, when his house manager murdered him, his family, and the entire live-in staff.... Craftsmen and laborers working on renovations disappear or go mad.... For years, the Pendleton is a happy place, until a bad turn comes again.... Voices in unknown languages are heard in deserted rooms....
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hit or miss
- By donna on 12-31-11
By: Dean Koontz
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The Last Ballad
- A Novel
- By: Wiley Cash
- Narrated by: Karen White, Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Twelve times a week, 28-year-old Ella May Wiggins makes the two-mile trek to and from her job on the night shift at American Mill No. Two in Bessemer City, North Carolina. The insular community considers the mill's owners - the newly arrived Goldberg brothers - white but not American and expects them to pay Ella May and other workers less because they toil alongside African Americans like Violet, Ella May's best friend. While the dirty, hazardous job at the mill earns Ella May a paltry nine dollars for 72 hours of work each week, it's the only opportunity she has.
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Dryer than a popcorn fart
- By Scott Wilson on 02-11-18
By: Wiley Cash
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The Last Policeman
- The Last Policeman, Book 1
- By: Ben H. Winters
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway? Detective Hank Palace has faced this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. There’s no chance left. No hope. Just six precious months until impact. The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job—but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week—except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares.
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Not your regular mystery
- By Victor @ theAudiobookBlog dot com on 09-20-16
By: Ben H. Winters
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Grim Death and Bill the Electrocuted Criminal
- By: Mike Mignola, Thomas E. Sneigoski
- Narrated by: Paul Costanzo
- Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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From New York Times best-selling authors and illustrators Mike Mignola and Tom Sniegoski come two thrilling antiheroes: Grim Death and Bill the Electrocuted Criminal, battling against crime. An uneasiness festers upon the city streets, threatening the peace and safety of law-abiding citizens. A war is escalating, and it seems as though the good and righteous are being crushed beneath the unholy weight of evil's onslaught.
By: Mike Mignola, and others
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2113
- Stories Inspired by the Music of Rush
- By: John McFetridge - editor, Kevin J. Anderson - editor
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
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The music of Rush, one of the most successful bands in music history, is filled with fantastic stories, evocative images, thought-provoking futures and pasts. In this anthology, notable, best-selling, and award-winning writers each chose a Rush song as the spark for a new story, drawing inspiration from the visionary trio Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart.
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I'm a RUSH fan, but ...no..not this book
- By NBP on 07-15-17
By: John McFetridge - editor, and others
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A Dangerous Road
- Smokey Dalton, Book 1
- By: Kris Nelscott
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Private Investigator Smokey Dalton works for Memphis, Tennessee’s black community. He has almost no interaction with the white hierarchy, even though they exist only blocks away. So he’s surprised the day a white woman walks into his Beale Street office. Laura Hathaway has sought him out because he’s a beneficiary in her mother’s will, and Laura wants to know why. So does Smokey. He’s never heard of the Hathaways, but his search will take him on a journey that will change everything he’s ever known.
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Interesting Slice of US History...but Ponderous
- By Rancher on 12-18-13
By: Kris Nelscott
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The Bad Place
- By: Dean Koontz
- Narrated by: Carol Cowan, Michael Hanson
- Length: 15 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Frank Pollard awakens in an alley, knowing nothing but his name - and that he is in great danger. Having taken refuge in a motel, he wakes again only to find his hands covered in blood. As far as he knows, he's no killer. But whose blood is this, and how did it get there?
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THE BEST KOONTZ
- By Root VanDorn on 10-20-10
By: Dean Koontz
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Obsessed
- By: Ted Dekker
- Narrated by: Rob Lamont
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
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Stephen Friedman is just inches away from everything he could ever desire. It's Los Angeles in the early 70s, and Friedman is living the groovy southern California life of a real-estate wheeler dealer. He's making money hand-over-fist and has long given up hope of finding the family he's lost in worn-torn Poland. But when a deceased woman's papers reveal that she possessed a priceless religious relic, and that she may have been his mother, Stephen becomes hungry for answers. A hunger that may kill him.
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Dekker disappoints again!!
- By Robert on 05-28-05
By: Ted Dekker
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Koko
- Blue Rose Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Peter Straub
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 22 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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KOKO. Only four men knew what it meant. Now they must stop it. They are Vietnam vets — a doctor, a lawyer, a working stiff, and a writer. Very different from each other, they are nonetheless linked by a shared history and a single shattering secret. Now, they have been reunited and are about to embark on a quest that will take them from Washington, D.C., to the graveyards and fleshpots of the Far East to the human jungle of New York.
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7 hours in and I am done
- By bionichands on 01-26-12
By: Peter Straub
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The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown
- A Novel
- By: Paul Malmont
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 16 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1943, when the United States learns that Germany is on the verge of a deadly innovation that could tip the balance of the war, the government turns to an unlikely source for help: the nation’s top science fiction writers. Installed at a covert military lab within the Philadelphia Naval Yard are the most brilliant of these young visionaries. The unruly band is led by Robert Heinlein, the dashing and complicated master of the genre. His “Kamikaze Group,” is tasked with transforming the wonders of science fiction into science fact....
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Pulp Perfection!
- By Jim N on 08-31-12
By: Paul Malmont
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Kingdom Keepers: The Return Book One Disney Lands
- Kingdom Keepers: The Return, Book 1
- By: Ridley Pearson
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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With the defeat of the Overtakers behind them, the five teenagers known as the Kingdom Keepers should be celebrating. By all accounts they saved Disneyland from certain destruction. Why then did their mentor leave one last puzzle for them to decipher? The Keepers must solve a puzzle of the past, or be crushed under an evil that makes the Overtakers seem like gentle souls.
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Why do I keep buying these?
- By Rebecca on 04-04-16
By: Ridley Pearson
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Fifteen years after the events of Black Water Rising, Jay Porter is struggling to cope with catastrophic changes in his personal life and the disintegration of his environmental law practice. His victory against Cole Oil is still the crown jewel of his career, even if he hasn't yet seen a dime thanks to appeals. But time has taken its toll. Tired and restless, he's ready to quit.
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An Author You Need to Know
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A government special agent known only as the Signalman gets off a train on a stunningly hot morning in Winslow, Arizona. Later that day he meets a woman in a diner to exchange information about an event that happened a week earlier for which neither has an explanation but which haunts the Signalman. In a ranch house near the shore of the Salton Sea, a cult leader gathers up the weak and susceptible - the Children of the Next Level - and offers them something to believe in and a chance for transcendence. The future is coming, and they will help to usher it in.
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A glittering landscape of twenty-five speculative stories that challenge oppression and envision new futures for America - from N. K. Jemisin, Charles Yu, Jamie Ford, G. Willow Wilson, Charlie Jane Anders, Hugh Howey, and more.
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In this evocative short piece, Candace worries that her mother, Annie, has reached an emotional breaking point. When her best friend loses her battle with cancer, Annie is acting in uncharacteristic ways, seemingly less concerned than ever about what her friends and neighbors think of her - a troubling development in her daughter’s eyes. But while Candace may think she knows her mother better than anyone, something deeper lingers beneath the surface, and times of hardship have a way of bringing us closer together than ever.
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Great Short!
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In 1915, The Birth of a Nation casts a spell across America, swelling the Klan's ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk. All across the nation they ride, spreading fear and violence among the vulnerable. They plan to bring hell to Earth. But even Ku Kluxes can die.
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Laws of Depravity
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Every ten years, for the past 30 years, a dozen clergymen are killed, brutally murdered in twisted scenes emulating the deaths of Jesus and his disciples. Now, "The Martyr Maker" has set his mark on New York City. 30 years. 36 priests butchered. His bloodiest masterpiece is yet to come.
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Absolutely Worth It
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The Man Who Haunted Himself
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He’s one of America’s most brilliant neuroscientists. He’s also Black and dying of cancer. But he has a plan—a brain transfer. He’ll put his gifted mind into the body of Sammy Sturgeon, a White high school football star who was on the rise until a touchdown collision left him brain-dead. He convinces his co-conspirator, Dr. Dino Battaglia, to help him with the forbidden procedure. Douglass wakes up in Sammy’s White, athletic body, with his new family and legions of fans weeping at his miraculous recovery.
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Not good at all
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What listeners say about The Ballad of Black Tom
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jefferson
- 11-16-19
“I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day”
Victor LaValle’s award-winning novella The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) is an entertaining and scathing pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Rock” (1925), at once laying bare the invidious racism of the source story and out-Lovecrafting it.
Lovecraft’s story depicts the “hellish revelation” experienced by Thomas F. Malone, a sensitive white 42-year-old NYC policeman who’s interested in folklore and hence drawn to Brooklyn’s Red Hook slum: “a babel of sound and filth” full of “spiritual putrescence” and “the blasphemies of an hundred dialects” and modern crimes as well as sins handed down from pre-Aryan and even pre-human fertility rites, all due to the mongrel hybrid nature of the legal and illegal immigrant denizens--blacks, Asians, Syrians, Italians, and their like--the worst of whom are some mongoloid devil-worshipers. The story climaxes beneath the streets of NYC in a vast basement under a dilapidated Red Hook tenement, wherein a Babylonian revel takes place featuring said immigrants, a black magic orgy, white child sacrifice, Lilith, hell’s organ, a foul resurrection, a police raid, and a passive eye witness (Malone, who wants to believe it was all a dream).
LaValle’s reworking of that story highlights its racism. His novella is comprised of two parts, the first of which is told from the point of view of the 20-year-old African American hustler Charles Thomas “Tommy” Tester. Living in Harlem in 1924, Tommy knows that if he worked a typical job open to a black man he’d never earn much money and would be broken by hard, unprotected labor, like his slowly dying former bricklayer 41-year-old father. So Tommy plays the role of “the dazzling, down-and-out [negro] musician,” (even though he has no musical talent and knows only three songs) in neighborhoods where black performers are rare, thereby attracting white attention so as to be chosen for “arcane” courier work or similar jobs, earning more money in a night or two than his father could earn in a year or two.
In the opening scene Tommy delivers an ominous yellow book (The Supreme Alphabet) to one Ma Att in Queens, minus the last page, which he’s had his illiterate father remove so as to render the compact tome useless for its infernal intended purpose. This flawed product will play a role later in the story. Tommy then is hired by an eccentric wealthy old white man named Robert Suydam to play at a party at his mansion in a few days. Suydam is being monitored by NYC police Detective Thomas F. Malone (tall and thin) and private detective Mr. Howard (short and wide), who tell Tommy to return to Harlem and stay there where he belongs. The story, in Lovecraftian spirit, will soon provide Tommy with some revelations into the true reality lurking beneath the everyday world, but will also make him confront the worst reality of racism.
The scenes where Tommy takes the train into white neighborhoods like Queens and Flatbush are fascinating, darkly humorous, and horrible (without requiring cosmic Lovecraftian horror), as he’s constantly questioned by white conductors and passengers as to his destination, followed by white teens intent on beating him up, forced to play “the simple Negro” and to become “unremarkable, invisible, compliant” to avoid being lynched or arrested, and so on.
The second part of the story shifts to the point of view of Detective Malone (the white protagonist of Lovecraft’s story) as the would be seeker after occult lore becomes ever more aware that something ominous is happening in Red Hook and is finally made to stop shutting his eyes (literally!) on the terrors lurking behind the veil of everyday reality.
La Valle introduces into Lovecraft’s “story” an awful villain in Howard, a racist white ex-cop from Texas who acts and talks not unlike some of the more recent real-world white policemen who shoot unarmed black men to death and then say they feared for their lives. He also introduces Ma Att, a demonic female from Karnak who may possess an extraordinarily long body and tail. He writes more about Robert Suydam, making him the target of greedy relatives out to prove him insane so as to get at his wealth. He plays up the role of the raiding NYC police in the destruction of the tenements rented by Suydam in the climax. (Browning anti-aircraft machine guns!) He also adds a fair amount of graphic gore in the climax. (A straight-edge razor!) And he leaves out the rejuvenation, marriage, and temporary resurrection of Suydam.
Finally, LaValle’s additions and subtractions and refocusings of Lovecraft’s story and his writing of his own story all work to pose an excellent question: if there are Great Old Ones who care nothing for humanity, wouldn’t they be preferable to the small-minded evil hostility of racists? To quote Tommy’s great line, “I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day.” Indeed, one of the most impressive parts of the novella is the waking of the powerless Tommy Tester into the prodigious Black Tom.
LaValle is especially good with irony and humor, e.g., “A negro walking through this white neighborhood at damn near midnight? He might as well be Satan strolling through Eden.” He can outwrite Lovecraft, as when you compare his description of Suydam’s hair (“his hair blew out wildly like a dandelion’s soft white blowball”) with HP’s (“unkempt white hair”). LaValle’s vivid depiction of Tommy’s first entrance into Suydam’s creepy mansion (bigger inside than out, floorboards splintered and parched, the winds of the present not blowing there, and an invisible something following him and kicking his guitar case) is more uncanny than anything in Lovecraft’s story.
Kevin R. Free gives a great, savory and intelligent reading of the novella.
Fans of Lovecraft uncomfortable with his racism should like LaValle’s story, as should people interested in the savory side of 1920s NYC, cosmic horror, and authentic depictions of the racism once rampant and still too present in America.
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26 people found this helpful
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- Melanie M
- 09-13-18
A Perfect response to Mr Lovecraft.
Wow. Just wow. Have you ever read any Lovecraft and loved his mythos but wished he were a better writer and not such a xenophobic twat? Read Lovecraft's 'The Horror at Red Hook'....then read this. It's spectacular.
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19 people found this helpful
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- Jason Abbadon
- 05-24-16
One of the best books I've heard all year.
Utilizing some of the established Lovecraftian mythos almost as an afterthought, Victor LaValle spins his tale in a manner so engrossing that you lose yourself in the New York of yesteryear.
By the end of the tale, you're unsure exactly who to root for- Black Tom or the world he would destroy- and the story's monsters are so vile and detestable that you'll find yourself wishing they were supernatural.
My highest possible recommendation- both for story and for Kevin R. Free's nuanced storytelling.
Five of Five stars- in all categories.
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15 people found this helpful
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- R. Sharath Kumar
- 04-22-17
Cosmic horror for the modern reader.
The story builds pace rather quickly and grips the reader. Very unlike the slow burn lovecraftian horror I was expecting. However, it slows down towards the mid point but picks up again a little later.
The prose is fantastically written, Victor Lavalle's prose is like poetry but never feels over done.
The only gripe I have with this book, is that it kind of fizzles out and never does end properly. But then again, it's horror on a cosmic scale, us puny humans wouldn't get it anyway.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Ryland
- 03-26-16
Absorbing, sad, and uncanny Lovecraftian tale of an outsider from Harlem
This story does a lot in a short space but never loses its cool focus. The author played with all the tropes just right to dig into the atmosphere, the character, and the unknowable, untameable, supernatural forces at play. Having blues music (its lyrics, its power, its emotion, its loss, its use as plot lure for the protagonist as musician) merge with a well-paced Lovecraftian tale of temptations and mistakes was a treat, and that state of segregation and blatant racism from whites with blacks and chinese and whoever else deemed foreign and as low as a beast in society of that time is emphasized by, and helps to emphasize, the sense of dangerous boundaries, of being an outsider and of having outside forces lurking in the corner of our lives. But besides these societal and Lovecraftian forces at play, we also have the protagonist's personal relationships and self-awareness bringing in a sad, touching thread of humanity struggling to survive its fall. I also enjoyed having the story flip to another character's view in the middle to give us another layer to the horror. Highly recommended listen. The narrator was spot on, and gave justice to different character accents. Get it.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Caitlin M Grabarek
- 10-10-17
Well written, well voiced
This was a novel retelling of HP Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook" from the perspective of Tom Tester. Kevin R Free is one of my all-time favorite readers and this performance does not disappoint. I would recommend this title to anyone looking for a quick and engaging horror story.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Student
- 09-23-18
Good Start Sloppy Finish
This was a decent listen, I must say listening to the source material first (H.P. Lovecraft's The Horror at Red Hook) makes this far more enjoyable -at least the first half anyway. Not to mention since this story is supposed to be about Tom I would have much preferred the whole book focus on Tom's story instead of only giving us half of a story about Tom. After the first half of the book the end feels rushed as if the author just wanted to move on to something else.
Anyhow, the narrator is pretty talented. I wish he'd voiced Malone differently, but that may have to do with the way the character has been written in this book. Tom and everyone else is handled pretty well in my opinion though.
So not an amazing book, but a decent enough ride that I'd say it's worth listening too.
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- melissa williams
- 09-17-18
Worth a listen
A great plot and one of Lavalle's better works...the actor did a great job embodying the voices of the characters.
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- Julian C. Chambliss
- 05-26-17
Great twist on a genre
This is well worthy your time. The author does a great job of using New York City as a backdrop for a complex story that takes Lovecraft racial hysteria and turns it on his head.
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- William Vigil
- 04-20-17
Entertaining
I liked the idea and the writing was good. The narrative and the voice seemed at odds in some passages. Those looking for Lovecraftian horror should pass on this one. it is a supernatural detective story with some light 'old gods' backstory.
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