A follow up to the excellent Winter Tides, here we see the Mi-Go, the “Fungi from Yuggoth”, presented in a sympathetic light.

Turns out they’re people. People whose mission is to “talk to everyone”, to learn from any intelligent life, anywhere, and to introduce the people they meet to the true sprawl,of the universe.

Lovecraft’s Mi-Go seem hostile—tearing out people’s brains and po—ing them into canisters, where they can see and talk with the right technological accessories, but where access to those tools is subject to the whims of the aliens. Emrys’s Mi-Go, “the Outer Ones”, demonstrate a more positive plan—in general, they only take those who desire the experiences they offer, and they can swap brains back and forth between bodies and canisters.

They’re not unambiguously good, however. They can, and do, take people without permission sometimes. They’re also willing to do some mental manipulation when it’s to their advantage, and there are different factions whose plans for humanity clash.

Aphra Marsh and her confluence encounter them while searching for more relatives with Deep One blood, hoping to continue/restore the onshore community they lost in the Innsmouth raid. Both our friendly and less friendly FBI agents get involved, and old wounds are opened between the Deep Ones and the aliens. In the end, the tensions between regular humans, Deep Ones, and Outer Ones change, but remain unresolved. The Cold War lumbers on, with the possibility of nuclear annihilation continuing.

We may have managed to thread that needle thus far, with the peak and breaking point in the 1980s, but the threat remains, with newly unstable nuclear powers, including some we thought were out of the game, back to issueing blustering threats. At least the Deep Ones will (probably) survive the destruction of the surface world; the rest of are not so lucky. ( )

I think I enjoyed this one even more than its predecessor, [b:Winter Tide|29939089|Winter Tide (The Innsmouth Legacy, #1)|Ruthanna Emrys|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463670456l/29939089._SY75_.jpg|47306624]. There were more Lovecraftian monsters, and it was a touch more cosmic than the last, and the characters continue to grow and define themselves.

I love how Emrys has taken the mythos and bent it and shaped it into something all her own, while still holding to the classic stories as much as possible.

Well done. ( )

I want these things to be real: the intelligences from beyond the Earth; the cities that rose in golden splendor millennia before our own histories begin; the scholars who consort with dark forces, who sacrifice air and light and their human forms in exchange for unimaginable secrets. I want to see them. I want to talk with them, to decide for myself whether that deal is worth taking. ( )

I really enjoyed this novel, but let's be real here: this isn't your average Cthulhu monster novel full of mystery and intrigue and reveals that turn your hair white in disbelief. There aren't even 1d6 investigators to throw into the open maw of a multitentacled AND multidimensional immortal beastie!

But there are multitentacled and multidimensional immortal beasties, ghouls, Deep Ones, halfbreeds and Creatures of Air. Not to mention strange boxes, a focus on books, legacy, and the ultimate fate of mankind. I mean, the whole thing that comes with a Cthulhu tale is the realization that we're insignificant specks of poop in a disturbed nightmare of a dead but sleeping god. Of *course* our fates are up in the air!

But that's where we take our tale out of the norm and place it firmly in the hands of a nuanced and careful character who has been locked away in a concentration camp thanks to her own country, who only wants to read and preserve her culture, who had suffered a massacre of almost all her people on her home soil in Innsmouth.

And she's a monster. An immature Deep One. Who likes books and just wants to be left alone. But thanks to the FBI and her folks under the sea and a nightmare of diplomacy with other Outsiders that reckon diplomatic negotiations in terms of 50 thousand years, she's thrown right into a tangled tentacular soup trying to protect the flies (that's us humans) with the super-technologically-advanced multidimensional space-traveling immortals that WE call Lovecraftian horrors.

The premise and deep exploration of characters and processes and reveals -- including dreamwalking, magics, and threats from well-meaning gods that think that consuming us is a proper way to preserve us forever --is a perfect delight.

It is NOT a humorous tale, however. So fans of Stross' Laundry Files should be forewarned. It is, however, philosophical, ethical, and it tries to answer all the questions about what constitutes MONSTERS. No one is at fault, but the power differentials are immense... and even the flies can sting.

I'm perfectly on board for reading this series until the end of time. :) It's deep, clever, and monstrous. :) ( )

Deep Roots is the third Aphra Marsh story of the mid-century US from the perspective of Lovecraftian "monsters." While all these tales show a thorough acquaintance with and considerable affection for the whole Lovecraft oeuvre, they each have one or two signal stories to which they refer. In "The Litany of Earth" author Emrys is chiefly working in relation to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." In Winter Tide she draws on "The Thing on the Doorstep" and "The Shadow Out of Time." And Deep Roots takes its chief elements from "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath."

"The Whisperer in Darkness" is easily one of my favorite HPL stories, and a rarely-credited seminal tale of extraterrestrial invasion. When it comes to Emrys' re-visioning of the Mi-Go who are the central menace of that source story, she totally nails it. The last time I felt such a vividly ambivalent attraction to a cosmopolitan alien intelligence was for the Multipliers of Ken MacLeod's Engine City. Emrys' treatment of the Dreamlands follows that of the recent Arkham Horror novella by Jennifer Brozek (To Ride the Black Wind) and the Dreamland-native Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson. There are no cats in this book, but the ghouls are important and well-conceived.

I didn't feel overwhelmed or distracted by new characters in Deep Roots, and it offered some satisfying development of the ones established in the earlier stories. I liked it more than Winter Tide, but I'm not sure how it would work as a standalone read. I think it needs its predecessor stories for proper appreciation. I continue to enjoy Emrys' work in what has been alleged to be the "mythos" of yog-sothothery, which she more realistically terms a "sandbox."