The Litany of Earth

The Litany of Earth is a novella by Ruthanna Emrys, published by Tor in 2014. It is the beginning of her Innsmouth Legacy series, which sympathetically explores the Deep Ones of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and the aftermath of their persecution by the United States government.
== Synopsis==
The story centers on Aphra Marsh, a woman from Innsmouth with Deep One ancestry. After the 1928 government raid on her hometown, in which her father was killed, she was sent to a concentration camp in Oklahoma, where her mother disappears. The Innsmouth captives are later joined by Japanese-Americans interned during World War II. At war's end, the few survivors from Innsmouth are released, including Aphra and her brother Caleb; their mother died . After 17 years as a prisoner, she moves to San Francisco, where she lives with the Kotos, a Japanese-American family that she met in the camp.
Aphra works at a used bookstore run by Charlie Day, a gruff but protective man not much older than her, who has an interest in forbidden texts. He is unaware of her heritage, but when he learns of her familiarity with the ancient languages of Enochian and R'lyehn, he persuades her to begin teaching him the rudiments of magic.
At the bookstore, she encounters a customer who asks for books by the likes of Al-Hazred and Prinn; he turns out to be an FBI inspector named Ron Spector, who seeks to recruit her to help the Bureau investigate what are referred to as Aeonists--worshippers of Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones. Though Aphra is originally repulsed by the idea of working for a government that has subjected her family to atrocities, his pitch to her sums up the books attitude toward the Cthulhu Mythos:
As an example of the latter sort of Aeonists, Spector alludes to the New Orleans sect described in Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu":
Aphra rebuffs Spector, but after he shares information about her mother's fate--she died after being subjected to grisly experiments when she began to transition--and reveals that he has relatives that were victims of the Nazi Holocaust, she reluctantly agrees to check out an Aeonist group for him. It's led by a wealthy San Franciscan named Oswin Wilder; one of his chief followers is an older woman named Mildred Bergman, who is immediately suspicious of Aphra. It is soon evident that Wilder's cult has no real magic--but he does pose a threat to followers like Bergman, offering a false and deadly promise of oceanic immortality.
== The Litany of Earth==
The title refers to a list of the various species, 13 in all, that in the past, present or future are dominant on Earth. The litany starts with the "five-winged eldermost of Earth," followed by "the Shoggoth, who rebelled against their makers". The current dominant species are humans, which the litany divides into three groups: "the people of the rock, the K’n-yan", the "Mad Ones Under the Earth", the hidden civilization described in Lovecraft's "The Mound"; the "people of the air", which is to say regular humans, "who spread far and breed freely"; and "the people of the water", or Deep Ones.
This list was derived from the Deep Ones' encounters with the Great Race of Yith from Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time":
Category:Ruthanna Emrys Works
Category:Expanded Mythos Works