bibliogramma | Ruthanna Emrys; Winter Tide (Reply)

Ruthanna Emrys’ debut novel, Winter Tide, is a treat. It revisits the lead character from her excellent novelette, “Litany of Earth.” This is a wonderful Lovecraftean historical fantasy, which starts from the premise that it is the victors who write the histories, and racists who invent stories of atrocities and foulness about those who are different, and so we - the readers - cannot trust what we have been told about the seapeople of Innsmouth.

Aphra Marsh is one of the last of the seapeople of Innsmouth. She and her brother are the only survivors of 18 years spent in an American concentration camp in the desert, where all her land-dwelling people had been sent after a campaign of lies resulted in the government sweeping them all up into captivity. People of the water die easily in the dry desert air, and so it was that only she and Caleb and one old man on the verge of his death were still there when the camp was used again to intern Japanese Americans.

Finally freed after the end of WWII, Aphra moved to San Francisco to live with the Japanese family that adopted her in the camp, and since then she has been looking for the lost wisdom of her people, aided by antiquarian bookseller and aspiring student of magic Charlie Day.

The government still keeps tabs on her, of course, and they have come to her now as one if the few who know anything about the heritage of magic that is in her blood. The Cold War is on, and there are rumours that the Russians have found the lost secret of mind transference - taking over another’s body. If true, nothing prevents them from assuming the bodies of key people in the US government.

The FBI wants Aphra to find out everything she can about this old, forbidden magic. In return, they are giving her and her brother access to the restricted libraries of Miskatonic University, where the books seized from her people have been placed.

This is a wonderful book that speaks deeply about the experience of being other. In addition to Aphra and Caleb, the last children of a persecuted race, the cast of characters includes Neko, Aphra’s adopted sister; Charlie, a gay disabled man; Spector, the Jewish FBI agent who becomes Charlie’s lover; Dee, an black woman working undercover as the servant and mistress of a prominent Miskatonic professor; Audrey, a student at Miskatonic’s less-regarded sister college, Aphra’s student, and a woman who carries the blood of the third of humanity’s races, the rarely seen people of earth; and the most “other” of all, the ancient Yith consciousness currently occupying the body of Miskatonic’s only female professor, Dr. Trumbull.

Socially conscious fans of the Lovecraft mythos will also appreciate the reworking of the overtly racist horror tropes of that mythos into a religious practice that has been misunderstood and libelled as so many non-Christian spiritual traditions have, with specific Lovecraft tales reworked as cautionary stories about the misuse of power, or as accounts of the acts of criminals within the seapeople community.

Emrys writes in an afterword that she originally had no intention of returning to Aphra Marsh’s story after that initial novelette, but realised that there was more to say. I find myself hoping that at some point, she will return again to the characters of Winter Tide, because I want to hear more if the true stories of the people of water.