How author Ruthanna Emrys is subverting Lovecraft’s tropes with her own cosmic horror series

Earlier this year, I picked up Ruthanna Emrys’ debut novel, Winter Tide, a tale based on the exhaustively canvassed cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. Along with a previous novelette called The Litany of Earth, it subverts Lovecraft’s notorious racism by making his monsters — which were often thinly veiled stand-ins for people of color — sympathetic protagonists. In the 1920s, the US government locks ancient Deep Ones in internment camps, including the series’ protago