The Litany of Earth

It's a few years after the end of World War II, and Aphra Marsh is living in San Francisco. She's living with a family that, like her own, spent the war locked up as possible threats, despite neither guilt nor evidence, solely based on group identity.

The Kotos are Japanese-Americans.

Aphra Marsh is something else, as her family was. The greatest cruelty they were subjected to was isolation from the sea.

With most of her family and all their possessions gone, and having lived too much of her life in captivity, Aphra doesn't have as complete an education in their ways as she would like. There may be more texts than the pitiful few she has recovered hidden away at Miskatonic University, but she'll never be able to get access to them.

But show more somewhere along the way she meets an old bookseller, who in the back room of his shop has his own private collection of materials--some real, some fakes--and a great desire to learn.

Into this sometimes fragile new life, an FBI agent walks, and threatens to upend her life again.

This is an interesting and extremely well-done take on the Cthulu mythos, and I very much enjoyed the unfolding of Aphra's identity and personality, as well as her relationship with the bookseller and the Kotos.

Recommended. show less

This is one of the best things I've read recently, and a fascinating take on the Lovecraftian mythos. The parallels with various governmental atrocities, like the Holocaust and the internment camps for Japanese-Americans, are timely.

But mostly, it's Aphra's story- she's a Deep One, in her semi-human phase of life, and her experience with the destruction of Innsmouth has made her close herself off. In this story- somewhere between a short story and a novella- she starts to open up a bit, despite her realistic apprehensions.

Everything in this story worked, and worked well together. The writing is thoughtful and well-paced. The characters stand out as individuals.

I will be reading more by Emrys, definitely! I love both her writing, and her show more take on the Mythos. show less

The Litany of Earth is a prequel novella to Emrys's series of Lovecraft-ian historical fantasy. Set in San Francisco after World War II, our heroine is Aphra Marsh, one of the last Marshes of Innsmouth—and one of the last Innsmouth-ians, period. After the events of "The Shadow over Innsmouth", her people were sent to desert internment camps, where almost all of them died except Aphra and her brother. She now lives with Japanese-American friends who were interned in her camp during the war while trying to regain her strength and figure out her next steps. Then one day an FBI agent turns up at the bookstore where she works and asks her work for them to take out a potentially dangerous cult. She wants nothing more than to refuse, but in show more the end this task may be the very thing she needed.

A nice, well-written novella that sets up the reader well for Winter Tide, the series's first book, which came out in early April. You don't need to have read Lovecraft to appreciate this one, but some things will make more sense if you have. And at only 99¢, it's a pretty good deal, even if it is on the shorter side. show less

This story does a great job subverting the standard Lovecraftian narrative. Instead of being a scary subhuman Other, the narrator is humanized and we have to face what's been done to her people.

I guess I should have read this before Winter Tide, but it was fine that way around, too.

4.5/5