Deep Roots Delves Further into Lovecraft’s Mythos

After the Innsmouth Raid in 1928, the survivors were sent off to internment camps, where they were eventually joined with Japanese-Americans during WWII. In the wake of the war, one of the few who remained, Aphra Marsh, has fought to rekindle what remains of her community. Now with a tenuous hold on her past, she seeks more distant relatives to help rebuild Innsmouth, a search that will bring her to New York City, and an encounter with one of the strangest species in all of Lovecraft’s Mythos, the Outer Ones—the Mi-Go. But the Mi-Go have a Plan of their own.

Winter Tide (which followed the novelette “Litany of Earth“) is very much a cozy Mythos book, offering a gentle introduction to a sympathetic character Lovecraft himself would have painted as a monster. Aphra Marsh is the Eldest-on-Land. Almost all of the rest of the surviving People of the Water—what Lovecraft fans might call the Deep Ones—have passed to R’lyeh beneath the ocean. The first novel tells the story of Aphra’s Innsmouth homecoming, and her efforts, alongside her brother Caleb, to rebuild the surface community that was ripped away from her people. It’s not a horror novel, despite its roots in the Mythos, especially since the “monster” in question is our protagonist. Instead, it draws the reader into the world and character in a quiet, haunting way.

Deep Roots is of a piece with its predecessor. It is foremost a study in character and relationships, as Emrys’ shows us new facets of Aphra, Caleb and her “found family” of friends and allies. Seeing her lead them “on the road” to New York illustrates a quality one of the Mi-Go later identifies in her as well: Aphra has a knack for forging communities around her. It is her superpower.

As this alternate history unfurls, the USSR and the U.S. remain locked in a Cold War, and the future of humanity itself is in doubt, a macro scale version of the fate Aphra’s people are facing. As she and Caleb are the last full-blooded People of the Water walking the surface world, finding anyone remaining with even a sliver of their ancestry is the only way to avoid closing the book on their kind. Without them, there will be no more Deep Ones, as those who have gone into the sea are much-changed, and cannot have children.

Aphra is a fascinating character, a survivor of a race that looks like but is set apart from humanity. There is an abiding loneliness to being a survivor, a separateness few can truly understand. Her eagerness to forge bonds with new friends and companions is therefore understandable—she hungers to connect with others who share and can expand her knowledge of alien and eldritch things, subject of ambiguous provenance that ordinary humans do not understand.

It is in the continued reinvention of the Mythos that Deep Roots distinguishes itself from its predecessor, widening the focus from Aphra’s People of the Water to introduce the Outer Ones, the Mi-Go—strange creatures of high science, with a penchant for luring people to travel, by means of their arcane cylinders, to distant worlds. While this might sound like an attractive to someone in 1949, for whom space travel is still the stuff of Buck Rogers, the Mi-Go method is less science-fictional, and more a process of separating mind from body. There are yet deeper revelations about Emrys’ version of Lovecraft’s world, and a visit to the Dreamlands, that strange other-dimension, not of the waking world.

Emrys clearly has her own deep roots in Lovecraft’s work, and every element of it she brings into her world enriches the tapestry of her story, and bringing to life a tangible alternate Earth. Readers with an interest in exploring what the Lovecraft Mythos can  offers to 21st century fantasy would do well to get to know Aphra Marsh.

Winter Tide and Deep Roots are available now.