Growing up as a genre-loving child in the United States during the 1980s, there were figures and faces that couldn’t be avoided. It didn’t matter whether you liked epic fantasy or not: odds were good that you would know who Tolkien was, and be able to explain, at least in broad strokes, the story he’d been trying to share. Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, C.S. Lewis, they all loomed large over the literary landscape we were trying to transverse, setting the shape of the world around us. There were women among their number—Anne McCaffrey, James Tiptree, Jr., A.C. Crispin—but they weren’t very common, and they rarely seemed to sink their roots as deeply.
And then there was H.P. Lovecraft.
As a little girl sneaking horror novels in the rear stacks of my local library, I knew that something was off about Lovecraft’s way of looking at the world, but it would be years before I realized that the primary difference between his mythos and the worlds created by other authors was that he didn’t really seem to want me there. Women, in his reality, were either absent, cruel, or channels for terrifying entities from beyond space and time.
By the time I was in my teens, two narratives were warring for control of Lovecraft’s legacy: the people who cried that it shouldn’t matter what kind of man he’d been, not when he’d left us such remarkable stories, and the ones who stood up and said that no, it did matter: that women and people of color and everyone else deserved to be a part of the sprawling shared universe he had accidentally created. That if Cthulhu was coming to devour the world, we all deserved to have a say in stopping him.
I’ll be honest: the whole discussion was distressing for me, from a whole lot of directions, because you can’t get away from Lovecraft. Like Tolkien, timing and a certain vividness of imagery meant that he was able to get in on the ground floor of his genre’s modern face. It doesn’t matter if you ever read Lovecraft. His fingerprints are everywhere in modern horror, filtering through other hands to influence new writers who might well be horrified to learn how much they’ve taken, however tangentially, from a man who is now widely recognized to have been racist, misogynistic, and prejudiced, not just for his time, but for all of time.
(Yes, there is an argument to be made that understanding grows and changes, and that what seems bigoted today was perfectly acceptable yesterday. I’d like to note that the people making this argument are almost never of the group being discriminated against—historical racism seems a lot easier to swallow when it’s not being aimed at you. But also, even when racism, or sexism, or general bigotry was “more acceptable” than it is now, there have always been people who pushed even that envelope, holding and espousing beliefs that were not considered appropriate at any time. Lovecraft, sadly, based on his own work as well as the work of his peers, was among the latter.)
Buy the Book
Winter Tide (The Innsmouth Legacy)
If you read horror, you have read narratives that were influenced by, if not wholly inspired by, Lovecraft. And if you’re like me, at some point you’ve stopped and asked yourself whether this means you’re continuing to support a genre that doesn’t really want you there.
A personal note: I have become very, very cautious about reading anything that says it’s influenced by the Cthulhu Mythos, because half the time, that means “I wanted to be really sexist/racist/both, and this seemed like the best way to get away with it.” So when I received an ARC of Ruthanna Emrys’s Winter Tide from my publisher, I opened it mostly out of politeness. I’ll at least try to read everything, even if I bounce off half of it.
Instead, I lost several hours of my life, and did a few angry laps around my house, hating the fact that I hadn’t come up with the idea for the book first. Here, finally, was the perfect refutation of Lovecraft’s toxic side: here was a Mythos that had been cracked open like a crab, lain bare so that we could pick at its innards. It was perfect. It is still, if you haven’t read it, perfect. It could have been the end, and I would have been content—and I was, I think understandably, a little wary when the sequel was announced, because I wanted more, but how could anything else ever be so perfect.
Deep Roots is not perfect. It can’t be. It lacks the blazing newness of Winter Tide, which was a powerful enough force to make any small errors forgivable: it’s not the first step in a journey, and that makes it easier to see the flaws. It is, instead, essential, and should be required reading for anyone who wants to explore the stages of grief. Aphra, our main character and entry into this world, is grieving. She spends the book realizing that the solution to diaspora is not going home, because you can’t; you can’t walk back into the house that made you once it’s been burnt and gutted and expect everything to be precisely the way it was before it all fell down. The world doesn’t work that way. Not for Aphra. Not for anyone.
Buy the Book
Deep Roots (The Innsmouth Legacy)
I described Deep Roots to a friend as “one long, primal scream of a book,” and I wasn’t wrong; everything in this story is an ache that can’t be healed, a wound that needs to be cleaned and stitched and forgiven, because it’s going to scar. It has to scar. There is no other way through the story.
If Winter Tide was the book my child’s heart needed to let me make my peace with Lovecraft’s flaws, Deep Roots is the book that says “finding the flaws doesn’t mean they must be forgiven, or that they ever can be; finding the flaws simply means that you don’t get to be innocent of them anymore.”
These books are gorgeous on their own, but they don’t exist on their own, and they’re never going to have the opportunity to do so: they exist as part of our modern literary conversation with Lovecraft’s works, and in that context, they are simultaneously unique and invaluable. They provide a view on the Mythos—which was, after all, never solely Lovecraft’s to begin with—that says we are all welcome, and they do so within the framework of brilliantly plotted, effortlessly paced, utterly human stories.
I think this is my favorite series of the last decade. I know it’s helping to heal wounds my heart has been carrying since I was a little girl, since I was too word-starved to explain why it hurt.
And that’s amazing.
Winter Tide is available now from Tor.com Publishing. Deep Roots publishes July 10th.
Read chapters 1-5 of Winter Tide here.
Seanan McGuire is the author of the October Daye urban fantasy series, the InCryptid series, and several other works, both standalone and in trilogies. She lives in a creaky old farmhouse in Northern California, and was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear fives times on the same Hugo ballot. The Wayward Children novella series —Every Heart a Doorway, Down Among the Sticks and Bones, and Beneath the Sugar Sky—is available from Tor.com Publishing
What you said! I can’t wait for the new book to come out, the first one was amazing. But you forgot to mention The Litany of Earth, a short story that takes place before Winter Tide. It’s introduces us to Aphra and what happened to her family. You don’t need to read it to understand the books but it’s a wonderful intro into this world.
“That if Cthulhu was coming to devour the world, we all (women, people of color, etc) deserved to have a say in stopping him.”
For a moment there I thought you would say we all deserved to be devoured by Cthulhu regardless of gender or ethnicity. And you’d be right, too. :D
Hi. Excellent commentary on Winter’s Tide. I agree that it is an important step forward in the way we craft modern mythology. To paraphrase Joseph Campbell, there are only a few lasting fundamental stories told depicting the human experience. What changes are the perspectives of those doing the telling. Ms. Emrys is one such perspective, and an important one. I do, respectfully, disagree with some of the narrative around HP Lovecraft as a racist or misogynist . While I do agree that he reflected some of the ignorance of the time in which he lived, I have always respected his honesty about the true nature of life in the universe . Predation, victimization, kill or be killed, survival of the fittest, the insignificance of man among all the stars and planets that we have never seen . I think that that kind of cold cosmic realism: that there are unknowable forces and they do not care for humanity or its ‘feelings’ is somewhat lost in these books compared to the orginal Lovecraft. And that is something I missed. Maybe it’s my experience as an Afghan war combat veteran, but I struggle with the model of moral equivalence that is offered by stories like these. That the mermen of Innsmouth were ‘misunderstood’ and that the FBI is akin to Nazis for detonating Devil’s Reef. I disagree. Lovecraft meant to say that the EoD was sacrificing kids and mating with with the denizens of R’yhlea (sp?). It was not just racism. It was a horror tale akin to invasion of the body snatchers, or the children of the corn. One thing history has told us is that some cultures are not compatible with one another. That sometimes social evolution is a zero-sum game. And I’m weary of any sort of ‘can’t we all get along’ narrative that says otherwise. While I love the Litany of the Earth tales, the attempt to make Cthulu and his minions more empathetic and relatable takes away from the pure joy of good vs. evil storytelling for me.
Thanks
I think a part of why Lovecraft almost never wrote good female and people of color into his stories is because he was too closeted to know one. He actually wrote two cool characters of color that honestly I am surprised no one talks about. They weren’t evil and they were written as smart and mysterious. One was straight up awesome and I wish I could find the story again, but it was one of his least known works.
I also miss the cosmic horror as described by matthew. That drew me into Lovecraft. It made sense. Why would non human, ultra powerful, and billion year old beings have the same moral structure as us? The Elders made us on a whim, mi go do brain surgery on us for who knows why, etc.
I think in all Love craft for his ideas on cosmic horror and his faults are what is inspiring me to write a far more inclusive mythos novel. I want to explore the other species we saw in his works.
I think this didactic viewpoint on Lovecraft is silly. Human beings are complex, the things he said about women and people of other races are indeed horrible, but that does not mean that everything else he ever did or said was horrible as well. He can, at once, be both a figure of incredible timelessness in his storytelling and a champion when it comes to intellectual property rights–and a figure of someone who was so thoroughly stuck in his own time. It’s not either/or; his legacy is dirt if his beliefs were horrid and his beliefs are dirt when his legacy is so incredible and inescapable.
Rudyard Kipling was a near unparalleled writer. He was ALSO an Imperialist. George Orwell, in many ways, was a thinker ahead of his time. He was ALSO a homophobe. The Founding Fathers were, in many ways, trailblazers and brilliant philosophers. They were ALSO all hypocrites and couldn’t think beyond themselves. Martin Luther King Jr. was an incredible man who stood against prejudice and showed that you can be a Christian without being a scornful nutjob. He was ALSO not up to speed on LGBT+ rights. FDR was an insanely good president and an astounding role model for disabled people who wore this country on his back like Atlas. He was ALSO behind Japanese Internment. These people all pushed the envelope for their times in their own ways, but they were still primitive.
Whenever people argue we ought to wash away history like that, I think it’s dangerous and that they haven’t really thought things through all that much. There is this old chestnut, you know: “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it”. History forgets what it wants to forget about people, and remembers what it wants to remember. That. Is. Dangerous. That. Is. Primitive. Too. Whenever people argue that Lovecraft’s legacy, or the memory any other massive name like that, should mean nothing and that brilliant minds can never also be nasty folks in their own ways, then brilliant minds in present and future will not have as much cause to improve. A great example of someone who learned from the mistakes of a tarnished legend would be Stephen Hawking. He was also an astounding role model for disabled people, and not a racist. Hawking rose from the ashes of FDR in many ways and carried the torch forward. Whenever people argue that the things Lovecraft said about gay people, black people, women, and so on do not matter–that brilliant minds cannot also share the bodies of very, very backwards folk–then that’s going to lead to thinkers, again, not having imperfect figures to look up to and be humbled by. How will someone rise from ashes, when you’ve swept the ashes under the rug? How can anyone carry the torch forward when you extinguish its light with every pass? Do we look to the person who discovered fire and think they were perfect, just because their achievement was so bright and so important?
The discussions should not be whether Lovecraft, or Kipling, or Orwell, and so on deserve to be remembered. They should be how we can move on and learn from their mistakes. The former kinds of discussions are simply reactionary and regressive. They help no one. It’s just a pit of quicksand people throw themselves in. We would be wise not to continue doing so.
History will not look back on us kindly if that’s what everyone does.
Seanan,
I too am wary of Mythos stories, and love Winter Tide. I am eagerly awaiting Deep Roots. Thanks for the review!
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Have you read ’14’ by Peter Clines? That is a very well-written Lovecraftian update that also succeeds in having solid female characters and more ethnic diversity while still maintaining an element of cold cosmic horror.
I recommend it for Lovecraft fans.
P.s.
I recommend Winter’s Tide, too. It may not be horror, but it’s a beautiful book. If you liked Shape of Water, (this year’s academy award winner) and if you recognized the Lovecraftian influence therein, you’ll love Ms. Emrys’ books.
Lovecraft was an abhorrent racist but he was (by the standards of the era) fairly progressive regarding women (he blamed sexism on “Orientals,” naturally).
The main reason all his characters are men is because all his characters are transparent author avatars.
“As a little girl sneaking horror novels in the rear stacks of my local library, I knew that something was off about Lovecraft’s way of looking at the world,”
As a 10 year old white hetrosexual male I knew there was something off about Lovecraft.
But, and I can only speak from my perspective, that was the point.
His work is fundamentally the expression of a pathology. That’s what is (loathsomely) compelling about it.
“Instead, I lost several hours of my life, and did a few angry laps around my house, hating the fact that I hadn’t come up with the idea for the book first.”
That’s my reaction to most of your stories.
“Yes, there is an argument to be made that understanding grows and changes, and that what seems bigoted today was perfectly acceptable yesterday. I’d like to note that the people making this argument are almost never of the group being discriminated against—historical racism seems a lot easier to swallow when it’s not being aimed at you.”
Yes. Of the people I see debating whether the bigotries of Lovecraft (or his ilk) should be condemned on principle or forgiven and looked past, I expect many are not on the receiving end of those bigotries every day of their/our lives. And that many of the marginalized people would prefer media not to be filled with narratively-endorsed echoes of what they/we live with. I appreciated Lovecraft for transcribing the sweet sea-dreams that seeped into his consciousness despite his unimaginable-to-me revulsion at all things marine, and sparking myriad later tales of aquatic humanoids, cosmic cephalopods, and suchlike. But some of the sadly-more-believable human prejudice and atrocity therein is hard to take and merits calling out.
@13: Precisely.
@2: Yeah, Cthulhu’s an equal opportunity devourerer.
I would gently point out that tales in the Lovecraftian tradition have never needed to be racist or sexist, and many haven’t been. It’s his sense of the cosmic that appealed to many of us who followed after.
another recent book for those of us readers wary of anything built on a Lovecraft mythos is Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country
I really hope not ‘half’ of all modern lovecraft is racist/sexist, and I feel concerned over that opinion because I have myself been retrofitting Lovecraftian concepts to better fit my model of a universe with other sentient aliens in it that interact with humanity.
I’m phrasing that deliberately (“sentient aliens that interact”) because you seem to think Cthulhu is an evil force despite being aware that Lovecraft himself assigned wickedness to entire races of humans for baseless reasons. Why take his word, or his distorted viewpoint, on the aliens he wrote any more than the human races that he wrote? If you read the text of Call of Cthulhu carefully, you’ll see this about the supposed ‘end of the world’ part:
“Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.“
This confession, extracted through torture, involves several key words that link Cthulhu himself to nonwhite races and other minorities. It has affiliations with vodou, it talks about “dark” houses and “dark” places, and “liberation” from a prison.
Ruthanna Emrys’ “monsters” aren’t monsters at all. That’s the whole notion.