The analysis of H.P Lovecraft’s literary corpora suggests a man who imbued much of his prejudices into his texts, mostly in the form of monsters, often as representations of actual demographics: Jews, Black people, Arabs, Spaniards, the Finnish, Mexicans, Portuguese, Asian people in general, and many others. Despite such problematic framing, Lovecraft’s mythos became a founding element of Weird Fiction. In recent years, authors such as Victor LaValle, Matt Ruff and Ruthanna Emrys have subverted some Lovecraftian concepts and tropes by repositioning minorities in their own mythos-inhabiting/inspired narratives. The current study reads Ruthanna Emrys’ Winter Tide (2019), specifically its 21st chapter, analysing the revisited ontological perception of the other as intended by the author of Winter Tide from a cognitive linguistics perspective taking into consideration the affects (Hogan, 2021) each text aims to evoke or portray. I argue Emrys aims to re-contextualise the narrative surrounding the town of Innsmouth and the fictional race of “The Deep Ones” employing deictic shifts in her text that move the implied reader away from the social and perceptual deixis (Stockwell, 2002) of the implied author of The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936). In Emrys’ narrative, concepts employed by Lovecraft to provoke fear and disgust such as cosmic meaningfulness, fish, the sea, non Anglo-Saxon ethnicities, and rituals are now depicted in more positive tones. I expect to demonstrate how Emrys work, when read as part of the mythos, can recontextualize the major perceptual-social deictic shift undertaken by the narrator at the end of the 1936 text.
