Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys

I said recently that I've now read more reinterpretations of Lovecraft than I have Lovecraft. (That wasn't hard, I've only read In the Mountains of Madness.) I guess today the scales are weighted even further on that side, with three interpretations up against one original. There's something about Lovecraft, even with, and perhaps because of, the racism, that makes it something to explore further, to look at how race intertwines with the Mythos, and grapple with what it would mean to take the lives of those he othered seriously.

So now we have Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys, which digs very deeply into the ideas of the outsider and uses them to thoughtful effect. This feels like a more cerebral book that Lovecraft Country, in many ways, and is interesting in the ways that it blends many different ways of being different in a dominant society and what that might mean when Lovecraft's stories are at least partially true.

This book takes as its starting point a Lovecraft story I haven't read - "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," about the not-quite human people living in Innsmouth. Emrys takes the starting point that the narrator of that story is an unreliable one, and all the dreadful things that are said about the children of Innsmouth are little more than blood libel and racism, directed at people who are human, but not quite the same kind of human as humans.

In other words, the dwellers in Innsmouth were "children of the water," a race slightly separate from the children of the earth, but only slightly. They were libelled, attacked, and put into internment camps where most of them died. The story takes place a few years after one of the two survivors, Aphra and her brother Caleb, had been released along with the other prisoners who were sent to the camps after most of the Innsmouth denizens had died - the Japanese, during World War II.

Aphra is enlisted by a Jewish FBI agent to go with him to Miskatonic University, and see if there is any evidence that the Russians have been trying to figure out a ritual for body possession. She goes because her family's papers are there, and once there, is plunged into inter-departmental politics, both at the university, (where one the professors is, unbeknownst to all, possessed by an ancient intelligent archivist), and the FBI itself. There are black characters, queer characters, Japanese characters, women, and of course, the Deep Ones, who return to the shore to welcome Aphra and Caleb back.

The way magic comes into this is two-fold. One, rituals are very dangerous - not so much because there are malevolent forces out there as that there are dangerous ones that don't care one way or the other about humans, and could easily destroy you if you attract their attention.  The other is that what Aphra practices as religion and ritual is mostly a form of community and connection to the world and the sea and the universe. It's a way of being that is benign, although often maligned.

That is really the meat of the story here - fear of difference, and how people who, for various reasons, are outsiders cope with that fear, and how we are all connected. Unless, of course, someone rips open a hole to a hostile outside force that takes residence in their brain. There's always that. But the Deep Ones may be there to help.

The writing in this one is not urgent, but I enjoyed the meditative aspects of the book, particularly the descriptions of the confluence that Aphra and her friends created. It's interesting to up-end the original story in this way.