Book Review: Winter Tide, by Ruthanna Emrys
This work of Lovecraftian fanfiction tries to make fish people friends.
Tordotcom, 2017, 366 pages
After attacking Devil's Reef in 1928, the US government rounded up the people of Innsmouth and took them to the desert, far from their ocean, their Deep One ancestors, and their sleeping god, Cthulhu. Only Aphra and Caleb Marsh survived the camps, and they emerged without a past or a future.
The government that stole Aphra's life now needs her help. FBI agent Ron Spector believes that communist spies have stolen dangerous magical secrets from Miskatonic University, secrets that could turn the Cold War hot in an instant and hasten the end of the human race. Aphra must return to the ruins of her home, gather scraps of her stolen history, and assemble a new family to face the darkness of human nature.
I was cringing a little as I began this book - my previous experience with Ruthanna Emrys was reading A Half-Built Garden, which, well, imagine a graduate student paper like "Queering the Alien Subaltern: Examining the Jewish Experience from a Genderfluid Feminist Perspective.... in Spaaaaace!" Padded out to novel length.
She does kind of have that Innsmouth Look.
Winter Tide is a very different story, but I feared an overwrought exercise in "queering Lovecraft." But maybe because this was her debut novel, the author doesn't go as overboard, though of course the Jewish FBI agent is also gay, the male characters are mostly idiots, and the main character, Aphra Marsh, is just an ugly maybe-asexual fish girl building a chosen family of fellow misfits and outcasts. As with A Half-Built Garden, it's pretty clear that the protagonist is a sort of idealized fantasy representation of the author.
So all that being said, this wasn't bad as Lovecraftian fanfiction goes. I will give Emrys this: she seems to actually respect the lore, even if she has to spiritually fight with its creator.
There have been many, many stories written now trying to retcon, reify, diversify, or cozify Lovecraft's mythos. Cthulhu and the Deep Ones and the Fungi from Yuggoth and the Shoggoths and the whole squamous menagerie have been represented as D&D monsters, as plushies, as chibi video game characters, and in countless works of fanfiction written by fans struggling to embrace Lovecraft's creations while confronting his infamous racism and anti-Semitism.
Winter Tide is inspired by one of Lovecraft's most famous stories, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which introduced the icthyoid Deep Ones, a race of frog-men or fish-men (Lovecraft himself is never particularly precise about the biology) that breeds with humans and worships Dagon, one of the dread Great Old Ones. In Lovecraft's story, of course, the Deep Ones are unambiguously vile, inhuman abominations who spawn horrible fish-eyed halfbreeds, worship a dark god who demands human sacrifice, and are a none-too-subtle metaphor for the author's revulsion of race-mixing and foreigners and their alien ways.
In Emrys's version, that's all just blood libel. Winter Tide picks up where Lovecraft's story left off, with the U.S. Navy destroying the Deep Ones' spawning grounds and rounding up all the Innsmouthers. The government sends all the survivors to internment camps in the desert, where all but Aphra Marsh and her brother Caleb died. Shortly thereafter, the very same camps were used to inter the Japanese during World War II. Emrys's metaphors are not much more subtle than Lovecraft's.
Aphra was eventually released from the camp, along with an adoptive Japanese family she met there. Now she lives in San Francisco and searches for the books that were confiscated from Innsmouth, trying to regain all their forgotten lore. Because the Innsmouth folk really did practice magic.
This story does a pretty good job of depicting Lovecraft's universe, in all its sanity-eroding, sometimes horrible starkness, while making his "monsters" human. Magic is (mostly) not unspeakable rituals to summon elder gods or achieve ultimate power at the cost of your sanity - but it is both a way to acquire knowledge, and dangerous. It really can break minds, and the Elder Gods might not be the malignant monstrosities described by Lovecraft, but they are vast and unknowable and at best indifferent to any puny Earth-dwellers who might attract their notice. Emrys makes Aphra Marsh pretty likeable for someone who's someday going to transform into a Deep One and live forever under the sea, but she doesn't try to make Cthulhu cute or the Deep Ones cuddly.
No, Cthulhu doesn't actually show up in the book. This is mostly a bit of a Lovecraftian Cold War thriller, largely taking place around Miskatonic University (of course). Aphra is pulled into a search for an alleged Russian agent who may have learned Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. Even Aphra doesn't think the Soviet Union knowing how to do things like body swaps and mind control would be a good thing, so she reluctantly allows the FBI to draft her into service. They promise they're really sorry about that whole genocide thing - that was the previous administration and they know better now, honest.
There are lots of shenanigans with dumbass college students who want to learn magic, Aphra's relatives who come ashore for a visit, and a time-traveling Yith currently residing in the body of a female professor of mathematics.
Will I read the next book in the series? Maybe. This was a novel with a lot more dialog than action, a sincere if slightly strained reading of Lovecraft's mythos, and I'm kind of curious to see how many other Lovecraftian creations show up. I'm not completely sold on Deep One Lives Matter, though.
Also by Ruthanna Emrys: My review of A Half-Built Garden.
My complete list of book reviews.
Tordotcom, 2017, 366 pages
After attacking Devil's Reef in 1928, the US government rounded up the people of Innsmouth and took them to the desert, far from their ocean, their Deep One ancestors, and their sleeping god, Cthulhu. Only Aphra and Caleb Marsh survived the camps, and they emerged without a past or a future.
The government that stole Aphra's life now needs her help. FBI agent Ron Spector believes that communist spies have stolen dangerous magical secrets from Miskatonic University, secrets that could turn the Cold War hot in an instant and hasten the end of the human race. Aphra must return to the ruins of her home, gather scraps of her stolen history, and assemble a new family to face the darkness of human nature.
I was cringing a little as I began this book - my previous experience with Ruthanna Emrys was reading A Half-Built Garden, which, well, imagine a graduate student paper like "Queering the Alien Subaltern: Examining the Jewish Experience from a Genderfluid Feminist Perspective.... in Spaaaaace!" Padded out to novel length.
She does kind of have that Innsmouth Look.
Winter Tide is a very different story, but I feared an overwrought exercise in "queering Lovecraft." But maybe because this was her debut novel, the author doesn't go as overboard, though of course the Jewish FBI agent is also gay, the male characters are mostly idiots, and the main character, Aphra Marsh, is just an ugly maybe-asexual fish girl building a chosen family of fellow misfits and outcasts. As with A Half-Built Garden, it's pretty clear that the protagonist is a sort of idealized fantasy representation of the author.
So all that being said, this wasn't bad as Lovecraftian fanfiction goes. I will give Emrys this: she seems to actually respect the lore, even if she has to spiritually fight with its creator.
There have been many, many stories written now trying to retcon, reify, diversify, or cozify Lovecraft's mythos. Cthulhu and the Deep Ones and the Fungi from Yuggoth and the Shoggoths and the whole squamous menagerie have been represented as D&D monsters, as plushies, as chibi video game characters, and in countless works of fanfiction written by fans struggling to embrace Lovecraft's creations while confronting his infamous racism and anti-Semitism.
Winter Tide is inspired by one of Lovecraft's most famous stories, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which introduced the icthyoid Deep Ones, a race of frog-men or fish-men (Lovecraft himself is never particularly precise about the biology) that breeds with humans and worships Dagon, one of the dread Great Old Ones. In Lovecraft's story, of course, the Deep Ones are unambiguously vile, inhuman abominations who spawn horrible fish-eyed halfbreeds, worship a dark god who demands human sacrifice, and are a none-too-subtle metaphor for the author's revulsion of race-mixing and foreigners and their alien ways.
In Emrys's version, that's all just blood libel. Winter Tide picks up where Lovecraft's story left off, with the U.S. Navy destroying the Deep Ones' spawning grounds and rounding up all the Innsmouthers. The government sends all the survivors to internment camps in the desert, where all but Aphra Marsh and her brother Caleb died. Shortly thereafter, the very same camps were used to inter the Japanese during World War II. Emrys's metaphors are not much more subtle than Lovecraft's.
Aphra was eventually released from the camp, along with an adoptive Japanese family she met there. Now she lives in San Francisco and searches for the books that were confiscated from Innsmouth, trying to regain all their forgotten lore. Because the Innsmouth folk really did practice magic.
This story does a pretty good job of depicting Lovecraft's universe, in all its sanity-eroding, sometimes horrible starkness, while making his "monsters" human. Magic is (mostly) not unspeakable rituals to summon elder gods or achieve ultimate power at the cost of your sanity - but it is both a way to acquire knowledge, and dangerous. It really can break minds, and the Elder Gods might not be the malignant monstrosities described by Lovecraft, but they are vast and unknowable and at best indifferent to any puny Earth-dwellers who might attract their notice. Emrys makes Aphra Marsh pretty likeable for someone who's someday going to transform into a Deep One and live forever under the sea, but she doesn't try to make Cthulhu cute or the Deep Ones cuddly.
No, Cthulhu doesn't actually show up in the book. This is mostly a bit of a Lovecraftian Cold War thriller, largely taking place around Miskatonic University (of course). Aphra is pulled into a search for an alleged Russian agent who may have learned Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. Even Aphra doesn't think the Soviet Union knowing how to do things like body swaps and mind control would be a good thing, so she reluctantly allows the FBI to draft her into service. They promise they're really sorry about that whole genocide thing - that was the previous administration and they know better now, honest.
There are lots of shenanigans with dumbass college students who want to learn magic, Aphra's relatives who come ashore for a visit, and a time-traveling Yith currently residing in the body of a female professor of mathematics.
Will I read the next book in the series? Maybe. This was a novel with a lot more dialog than action, a sincere if slightly strained reading of Lovecraft's mythos, and I'm kind of curious to see how many other Lovecraftian creations show up. I'm not completely sold on Deep One Lives Matter, though.
Also by Ruthanna Emrys: My review of A Half-Built Garden.
My complete list of book reviews.