“The Horror at Red Hook” is a short story H. P. Lovecraft wrote on August 1–2, 1925, first published in the January 1927 issue of Weird Tales. Police detective Thomas Malone follows a rise in kidnappings through Red Hook, the waterfront slum of Brooklyn. At the center stands Robert Suydam, a recluse and authority on medieval superstition, and in the basement beneath his flat Malone witnesses human sacrifice and a rite that reanimates Suydam’s corpse.
Lovecraft was living in poverty in Red Hook at the time and hoped to break into the detective pulps, which is why he gave the story an unusually proactive detective. It did not sell, and he fell back on Weird Tales. Its cult is a conventionally occult, devil-worshipping threat rather than a cosmic one, so the tale is usually placed outside the Cthulhu Mythos as a transitional piece — though Robert M. Price has read the cult’s Magna Mater as Shub-Niggurath.
Its reputation is cold. Lovecraft himself called it “rather long and rambling,” and critics including Lin Carter and S. T. Joshi have condemned it for its overt racism. Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom retells the same events through a Black man working for Suydam, turning the original’s gaze around.