It definitely makes my afternoon, if not my week or even month, that "As the Tide Came Flowing In" has been given a beautiful, reflective, ambivalent reading by Anne M. Pillsworth and Ruthanna Emrys at Tor.com's Reading the Weird:
All this ambiguity, all the different interpretations of reality swirling around her. And in the meantime the world moves on, from the age of whaling to World War I. The asylum fills up with PTSD patients, a new era of trauma. A new set of people who have to reconcile different realities, and aren't given an acceptable way to do so. Moonlight meets gaslight, flesh on one side of vision and sea-wrack on the other. We never do find out which to believe—and Lizzie may not find out either.
Pillsworth is right, incidentally, that the story began as a kind of campfire tale: it's told originally by one of the characters in "The Salt House" (Forget the Sleepless Shores, 2018), the "old, rattling family secret" of her seagoing great-grandfather and her landbound great-grandmother and their child conceived in adultery and insanity, because the alternative would be to accept a drowned lover returned for just one night like something out of a ballad, a ghost-golem of the sea. Ezra McKay was already a feature of that novella, but Elizabeth remained offstage. A man who does his own share of waiting on the shore thinks of her sympathetically and otherwise I knew only as much as her great-granddaughter's weird tale: "She died in Danvers State . . . She never could look on the sea again." I would love to be able to say that I started to think critically about her as I might have a lacuna in someone else's fiction—since I had never written either sequels or prequels to my own stories before, it felt at times more like an act of transformation than origination—but as far as I can tell what actually happened is that my habit of writing by pearl-grit just hit critical nacre. The previous fall, I had been taken to see Benjamin Russell and Caleb Purrington's The Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage 'Round the World (1848) in a former textile mill in New Bedford. I had accidentally had my first vacation in nearly a decade in the spring. At Readercon 30, Elise Matthesen made for me the pendant of labradorite and silver wire called "Was Ice, Am Ocean," which contains a shipwreck and which I associated at once with the Franklin expedition because of the thawing of the Northwest Passage and I rewatched AMC's The Terror (2018). I listened to a lot of chanteys and black metal during a heat wave and the research K-hole of nineteenth-century whaling into which I had somewhat counterproductively fallen while writing "The Salt House" a dozen years prior suddenly turned out to be useful after all. It took me a month rather than a year to finish "As the Tide Came Flowing In." It holds the record for longest historical fiction of mine to date. The punch line is that there is a third story concerning this family in progress, although I haven't had the mental room to do jack with it since the start of the pandemic. Universal basic income, please, and more ocean.
All this ambiguity, all the different interpretations of reality swirling around her. And in the meantime the world moves on, from the age of whaling to World War I. The asylum fills up with PTSD patients, a new era of trauma. A new set of people who have to reconcile different realities, and aren't given an acceptable way to do so. Moonlight meets gaslight, flesh on one side of vision and sea-wrack on the other. We never do find out which to believe—and Lizzie may not find out either.
Pillsworth is right, incidentally, that the story began as a kind of campfire tale: it's told originally by one of the characters in "The Salt House" (Forget the Sleepless Shores, 2018), the "old, rattling family secret" of her seagoing great-grandfather and her landbound great-grandmother and their child conceived in adultery and insanity, because the alternative would be to accept a drowned lover returned for just one night like something out of a ballad, a ghost-golem of the sea. Ezra McKay was already a feature of that novella, but Elizabeth remained offstage. A man who does his own share of waiting on the shore thinks of her sympathetically and otherwise I knew only as much as her great-granddaughter's weird tale: "She died in Danvers State . . . She never could look on the sea again." I would love to be able to say that I started to think critically about her as I might have a lacuna in someone else's fiction—since I had never written either sequels or prequels to my own stories before, it felt at times more like an act of transformation than origination—but as far as I can tell what actually happened is that my habit of writing by pearl-grit just hit critical nacre. The previous fall, I had been taken to see Benjamin Russell and Caleb Purrington's The Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage 'Round the World (1848) in a former textile mill in New Bedford. I had accidentally had my first vacation in nearly a decade in the spring. At Readercon 30, Elise Matthesen made for me the pendant of labradorite and silver wire called "Was Ice, Am Ocean," which contains a shipwreck and which I associated at once with the Franklin expedition because of the thawing of the Northwest Passage and I rewatched AMC's The Terror (2018). I listened to a lot of chanteys and black metal during a heat wave and the research K-hole of nineteenth-century whaling into which I had somewhat counterproductively fallen while writing "The Salt House" a dozen years prior suddenly turned out to be useful after all. It took me a month rather than a year to finish "As the Tide Came Flowing In." It holds the record for longest historical fiction of mine to date. The punch line is that there is a third story concerning this family in progress, although I haven't had the mental room to do jack with it since the start of the pandemic. Universal basic income, please, and more ocean.
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