Winter Tide (The Innsmouth Legacy Book 1)

As a kid, I was always bothered by one particular story when I read through my dogeared tattered Lovecraft collections - "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". Specifically, I was perplexed by the horror I was supposed to feel. I was more annoyed by our intrepid main character's narrow view of the world.

Ruthanna Emrys has given me back Innsmouth. To say more would not do justice to her work in cultivating a world where the FBI doubts itself and sees shadows of fascism in what it has done, and may still do. Aphra Marsh is the hero our culture needs.

A timely novel, and a joy to read. A love of the Mythos is recommended and certainly rewarded. I await more from the author with great anticipation.

What a lovely novel. It took me a while to get into Winter Tide, but once I did, I enjoyed it immensely.

Aphra and her brother Marsh are the only survivor of the government’s 1928 Innsmouth. In the desert camps, Aphra watched family, friends and neighbors die, far from the sea and the gods they worshiped. Eventually, the government forgot about Aphra and her brother, and they were released along with all the Japanese American families who’d been placed in internment camps during World War II. The FBI agent Aphra reluctantly helped in the short story that spawned Winter Tide, “The Litany of Earth” (which is available for free on Tor.com and also included in my edition of Winter Tide) once more seeks her aid. FBI agent Ron Spector fears that Communist operatives have stolen magical secrets from Miskatonic University. Aphra agrees to go with him, also realizing this could be a chance to regain some of the history she’s lost.

Something obvious to know about Winter Tide: it is working with the Lovecraftian mythos. I have never read Lovecraft, although I have read a few other stories using the mythos (The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe being an excellent one). However, I didn’t find my ignorance of the Lovecraft canon an impediment to enjoying Winter Tide. Emrys explains what needs to be explained. As Aphra is often surrounded with those less aware of the supernatural, there’s plenty of natural points for the narrative to do so without feeling like an info dump.

It took me a while to get into Winter Tide. I suppose it partly could have been due to my having no idea there was a short story that introduced the characters (for the record, I don’t think you need to have read “The Litany of Earth” before Winter Tide). However, I suspect it’s just because Winter Tide is a slower paced, more reflective sort of story. Winter Tide is a story focused on and driven by its characters.

Aphra may have lost all of her original family but Caleb, but she’s slowly building a new family around her. In the camps, a Japanese American family took her and her brother in, and her adopted sister travels with her to Miskatonic University. In San Francisco, where Aphra lives at the start of Winter Tide, she has found employment with a bookshop owner interested in the magical arts and has taken him on as an apprentice. In the course of Winter Tide, she finds others she feels some sort of affinity for, people marginalized and barred from power. If that doesn’t already tell you, Winter Tide has a diverse cast of characters who vary in race, religion, disability, and sexual orientation. I always love it when historical fiction represents the true diversity of the past.

On a related note, Emrys has said in interviews that Aphra is asexual. I’ll admit, that was part of why I picked up Winter Tide. While there where a few passages that I could understand through this knowledge of Aphra as ace, there’s not enough for it to be textually explicit. While there is no romance in Winter Tide, I have no clue as to whether or not Aphra is aro. Hopefully, we’ll see more of Aphra’s orientations in the sequel, but I wouldn’t recommend Winter Tide if you’re specifically looking for representation. Luckily, there’s plenty else to love about the book.

In short, I found Winter Tide to be a particularly impressive debut novel, and I loved the theme of found family. I want the sequel right away! Too bad I have to wait until this summer.

After the events of ‘The Legacy of Earth’, Aphra is asked to return to Massachusetts to look into possible use of Aeonist magic by foreign powers. Shockingly, it’s at Miskatonic U, which is where most of the contents of the libraries of Innsmouth ended up. There is wild library usage, visited to relatives under the sea, flashbacks to life behind the wire, accidental magic usage by stupid college kids, Yithians being pissy, and the wild world of early Cold War spycraft. Yes, it sounds like it’s confusing and muddled from the above, but seriously it works together.

Now, if you think the Canon of Grandpa Theobald is the measure to all other tales, you’ll have issues. This isn’t Zadok Allen’s Innsmouth. To give you a non-spoiler, people in Innsmouth call the rocky island offshore ‘Union Reef’ not ‘Devil Reef’. The lead character is female and Innsmouthian, and spunky. The other characters in her investigation party are not classic Lovecraft W.A.S.P.s either. There’s no flinching at how sexism and racism was in 40’s New England, especially in universities. The worship of the Great Old Ones is basically no different than any other religion. Including that some people are just like everyone else, except their god has tentacles, and that others are complete maniacs and kill people. Pretty much like any religion I can mention… Belief isn’t evil, knowledge isn’t evil. Evil is what you choose to do with both.

Long paragraph short, if you want your deep ones evil, pass on this book. If you want to see things from a different point of view, give it a read. 4 out of 5 tentacles up.

This book is a slow boil. Its got great world building. It seems to have all the Lovecraftian Mythos in all the right places. Yet the ending was lackluster and boring. All the characters just spinning their wheels and making friends, all to essentially end up back in the same place at the end.

Turns cosmic horror into cosmic bureaucracy.

Should we be surprised to read that the denizens of Innsmouth and Y'ha-nthlei don't think of themselves as hideous hybrids of fish and frog and man? Or that they call themselves Chyrlid Ajha, People of the Water, rather than the perhaps overly poetic Deep Ones? Or that to them the name Devil Reef just doesn't cut it? They say Union Reef -- they're not devils, after all, and that jagged upthrust of rock is the meeting place between earth and ocean, the land-bound spawning grounds and the promise of future glory that is their undersea outpost off Massachusetts.

No. No, we shouldn't be surprised at all. As natural as it may be for us land-based readers to enjoy a good scare at their expense, the People of the Water are our first cousins, separated from us by a mere tick or two of cosmic time, along with those other first cousins, the People of the Rock, aka the Mad Ones under the Earth. So it is written in the Archives of the Yith, who mentally span all time and space, and so says Aphra Marsh, born of Innsmouth, nearly martyred in the desert, now returned to Arkham to recover her family's stolen legacy.

That Aphra Marsh? Yes, that Aphra Marsh, whom we first met in "The Litany of the Earth". If you've yet to read this novelette, link to it and enjoy. Then, if you love "Litany" as much as I and many other readers have, you're in for an extended feast in Ruthanna Emrys's first novel, Winter Tide.

Those familiar with H. P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", will remember that its narrator rallied the U. S. government to raid that town and scour it of its blasphemous fish-frog inhabitants, worshippers of unthinkable gods, defilers of our pristine human gene pool, breeders of the dread shoggoth! Emrys doesn't allow the scouring to be passed over in a sentence or two. She makes the effectual annihilation of the Deep One's spawning population the germ of her story and novel, following the captured Innsmouthers into their desert internment camp. The desert -- and certain government experiments -- prove deadly to all but Aphra and her brother Caleb, who are barely holding on more than ten years later, when the Japanese internees arrive. Mama Rei Koto and her children are their salvation, and the first branching of Aphra's new family, which she, natural gardener of connections, continues to expand through Winter Tide.

The girl can't help it. She's already won over San Francisco bookseller Charlie Day, her official employer and fellow student of magic; also Ron Spector, the FBI agent who coerced her into helping the Bureau root out cultists in "Litany." Spector's back in Winter Tide., again looking for help but asking nicely this time, with genuine respect. The Cold War's on, and the Russians may be hot on the trail of very dangerous magic indeed: the ability to project one's mind into another's body. Talk about potential super-spies and super-saboteurs!

To Arkham and Miskatonic University, Aphra goes. Not only does she want to keep mind-switching techniques from the Russians (and everyone else) but brother Caleb's already there, trying to get access to Innsmouth's stolen libraries and artifacts. Soon Aphra takes on another magical student, Audrey Winslow, and spars with a visiting Yith scholar, who happens to have "borrowed" the body of Catherine Trumbull, Miskatonic's rare female professor. FBI agents less sympathetic than Spector appear to complicate matters. And because that's not enough trouble for Aphra, she finally reunites with her underwater family, a joyful occasion, but do they expect a lot from her and Caleb, the Deep Ones' sole land survivors? Of course they do -- what's family for?

Emrys's take on Lovecraft Country retains vital canon features while making the milieu her own, with such fresh piquant details as the post-WWII urban renewal in Innsmouth and the best way to scale the Miskatonic wall after curfew. By milieu, I mean geography and atmospherics and cosmology all three. But her moral outlook is keenly different from Lovecraft's, as it would have to be given we remain firmly and skillfully in Aphra's point of view. For her, people of the air were the monsters, people of the water the wronged ones, left homeless and adrift.

But Aphra's no mere victim or avenger archetype. As an Aeonist, follower of the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods, she's increasingly aware of the complexity of the cosmos and the awful/awesome depth of time. As an acute observer, she's increasingly aware of the complexity of individuals, including herself. At one point she muses, "We're all monsters, or related to monsters, one way or another." One definition of "monster" is a thing or person that deviates from the norm. If that's so, then Aphra could add, "Conversely, we're all good guys, or related to good guys, one way or another." And for her, that includes people of the air, and the water, and the rock, and even the near-godly Yith, who seek to preserve the tragic ephemera of existence through memory and highly advanced library science.

With its focus on character and the tender growth of character bonds into deep strong interlocking roots, this is a book to savor slowly, and to ponder. The writing itself is tender without sentimentality and deep without obscurity. One of my favorite passages beautifully captures Aphra's outlook, somber yet somehow hopeful:

"It is written in the Archives that, once upon a time, the gods looked out on a universe barren and unthinking save for themselves. And they tested and experimented until they sparked matter into a form that might, one day, be capable of thought. And Shub-Nigaroth, mother of fear, looked on the first life and said: it will fail, but for now it is good."

Earlier in the book Aphra has puzzled over the goddess's cognomen. Was Shub-Nigaroth mother of fear because She spawned horrors? Too simple and simplistic an answer. Aphra's mother has told her Shub-Nigaroth mothered fear because She mothered children, and children are terrifying. Young Aphra took this as a joke. Older Aphra begins to understand: When you love anyone, you risk the pain of loss, and the closer the bond, the greater the pain.

Yet worse than the risk of love would be the sort of self-isolation figured forth in Aphra's dreams as an endless walk along an empty beach, alone between mountain-high dunes and waveless sea. That would be a life not only miserable but somehow transgressive.

How Aphra finds the courage to rebuild her community is the adventure of this book, and one that only begins here, may the Outer Gods be thanked!

Writing quality is generally workmanlike if a bit slow but overall the book is mawkishly pandering and increasingly absurd in both plot and worldbuilding. Author tries every trick to make the monster protagonist sympathetic (which the book insists again and again - protests too much - is human but well, it’s obviously not!) and her enemies unsympathetic but it’s all a bit too forced and unconvincing.

What I was expecting: H.P. Lovecraft mythos stories without blatant racism, and sexism.

What I got: Cosmic Horror completely replaced with generic secret world style literature that bears little to no resemblance in feel to the source material.

If you're looking for updated Mythos, look elsewhere. If you wish the Mythos was Dresden Files... This'll probably do it for you. I'm not especially pleased with it, as the setting comes with certain expectations it did nowhere near enough to expel.

I got 75% of the way through it and I couldn't even bring myself to finish it. I generally don't have much respect for Cthulhu mythos stories due to the fact that they're too derivative and unoriginal. However, this story pales in comparison to even the most mundane Cthulhu mythos stories. Almost nothing happens. There are some extensions of Lovecraft's mythology but they are few and far between.

*Spoilers*
There's an attempt to empathize with the Deep Ones by having the story revolve around Aphra. Aphra is a Deep One who was displaced after the raid of Innsmouth, which happened at the end of Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". The story is essentially about Aphra, her brother, and her apprentice helping a government agent and his assistant investigate a Russian spy who attempted to learn how to magically switch bodies in order to undermine the US government. It mostly takes place in Arkham and revolves around the group interacting with college students, finding love interests, spending time in a library, and talking about how their cultural heritage was stolen by the government and is now being hoarded in the form of books by the Miskatonic University Library. They also end up staying with Yithian who has switched bodies with a university professor. That's pretty much the first 3/4th's of the book. I don't know what happens after that because I literally couldn't read another word out of sheer boredom. If you want a good Cthulhu mythos book, try Donald Tyson's version of Lovecraft's Necronomicon. Steer clear of this one. Lovecraft's monsters aren't supposed to empathized with and they're not supposed to be even remotely human. They're supposed to be incomparably inhuman to such an extent that it is impossible to empathize with them. They are supposed to be completely apathetic towards humans due to the fact that humans are essentially little more than ants to them. They aren't supposed to be going around falling in love with humans and talking about their civil rights. This is not Lovecraftian in the slightest and it's not horror.

I got 75% of the way through it and I couldn't even bring myself to finish it. I generally don't have much respect for Cthulhu mythos stories due to the fact that they're too derivative and unoriginal. However, this story pales in comparison to even the most mundane Cthulhu mythos stories. Almost nothing happens. There are some extensions of Lovecraft's mythology but they are few and far between.

*Spoilers*
There's an attempt to empathize with the Deep Ones by having the story revolve around Aphra. Aphra is a Deep One who was displaced after the raid of Innsmouth, which happened at the end of Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". The story is essentially about Aphra, her brother, and her apprentice helping a government agent and his assistant investigate a Russian spy who attempted to learn how to magically switch bodies in order to undermine the US government. It mostly takes place in Arkham and revolves around the group interacting with college students, finding love interests, spending time in a library, and talking about how their cultural heritage was stolen by the government and is now being hoarded in the form of books by the Miskatonic University Library. They also end up staying with Yithian who has switched bodies with a university professor. That's pretty much the first 3/4th's of the book. I don't know what happens after that because I literally couldn't read another word out of sheer boredom. If you want a good Cthulhu mythos book, try Donald Tyson's version of Lovecraft's Necronomicon. Steer clear of this one. Lovecraft's monsters aren't supposed to empathized with and they're not supposed to be even remotely human. They're supposed to be incomparably inhuman to such an extent that it is impossible to empathize with them. They are supposed to be completely apathetic towards humans due to the fact that humans are essentially little more than ants to them. They aren't supposed to be going around falling in love with humans and talking about their civil rights. This is not Lovecraftian in the slightest and it's not horror.

Total disappointment. A limp magical fantasy with a meandering and frankly boring plot.
Initially I thought the role reversal where the mythos bad guys become the well meaning oppressed heroes and vice versa had potential, but it’s so poorly executed in the end that just felt like a stunt.
The characterisation is dreadful. You can play intersectional identity politics bingo with their backstories (he is gay, he is gay, she is straight but she is black, she is Japanese) which would be fine except THATS ALL THERE IS TO THEM. Add the botched plotline, repetitious bloated magical ritual scenes and a busload of forgettable characters and it’s just a mess.
I can only see this appealing to people who deep down don’t actually like cosmic horror (or good plots, or rich characters).