The Changeling

Apollo Kagwa is a rare book dealer in New York, whose own father disappeared when he was a boy. He marries Emma Valentine, a librarian, and their son, Brian, is born on a stalled subway train. Then things begin to go wrong. Apollo lands what should be the find of his career, a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird inscribed by Harper Lee to Truman Capote. Emma grows convinced that the baby is not their child at all but a changeling. She kills him, attacks Apollo and vanishes.

After time on Rikers Island, Apollo goes looking for her with his friend and business partner Patrice. The search leads through the city's hidden corners: basements in the Bronx, a small island in the East River where a community of women has taken refuge, and a sinister neighborhood in Queens. The women on North Brother Island, led by a woman called Cal, are mothers who killed children they believed had been replaced. Behind them lies something much older. A Norwegian immigrant named Nils brought a troll to America, and his descendants, William Wheeler among them, have fed it children for generations in return for its protection, while Wheeler sells paying viewers a live online feed of Apollo's captive son. At the end Apollo cuts their son, alive, from the troll's stomach, Emma at his side, and the creature turns to stone at sunrise.

LaValle starts in the everyday world, a love story and a portrait of new parenthood in modern New York, and only slowly lets the fairy tale in. The slow start is deliberate, and the horror lands harder for it. Along the way the book has sharp things to say about everyday racism, the perils of personal technology and the rare book trade. Kirkus admired how the novel works through "what it means to be a parent." Readers of Neil Gaiman, or of LaValle's own The Ballad of Black Tom, will find it a natural next book.