In Lovecraft's 1936 novella, "The Shadow over Innsmouth", the town's inhabitants, seen by many to be "frog-monsters", are rounded up by the United States government in 1928 and imprisoned in concentration camps in the western interior of the country.

In Winter Tide's backstory, during World War II the captured Deep Ones are joined by Japanese Americans interred after the Attack on Pearl Harbor.

In return, Spector offers her access to the fictional Miskatonic University libraries in New England that house the confiscated Deep One literature seized during the 1928 raid on Innsmouth.

[5] In a review in The Verge, Andrew Liptak called Winter Tide "an impressive book that updates Lovecraft’s creations with added nuance and empathy.

[1] Liptak added that while Lovecraft wrote of "unspeakable evils and anxieties lurking at the ends of the world", Emrys describes the "horrors of discrimination and hatred" in his universe.

"[1] Megan M. McArdle wrote in Library Journal that Winter Tide is a mix of "Cold War paranoia and horror", and should interest Lovecraft fans.

[8] A review in Publishers Weekly described the novel as an "inventive dark fantasy [that] crossbreeds the cosmic horrors of the Cthulhu mythos with the espionage escapades of a Cold War thriller".