Providence Girls is a sapphic horror romance novel written by Morgan Dante, inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft with a romantic twist.
Told through the letters between Lavinia "Vin" Whateley and Asenath "Azzie" Waite, their paths cross when Vin is discovered nearly dead and brought into the care of Azzie. From there, a budding relationship forms between the two women as they bond over their painful pasts and their struggles to make new lives for themselves.
However, Vin notices that her dear friend has been exhibiting worrying signs of changes in her body. At first, it was just hair falling out; but as time goes on, the symptoms grow worse...
Dear Providence Girls; let me shares you these examples:
- Abusive Dad: Both Vin and Azzie had to deal with fathers that didn't love them and did them wrong.
- Vin's father was abusive to his daughter throughout her life, only showing her occasional crumbs of kindness she later surmises were a tool to manipulate her. And that's not even getting into the fact he raped his own daughter while channeling Yog-Sothoth to produce the twins, and tried to offer her up as a human sacrifice.
- Azzie's father never had any affection for his daughter because he believed women to be weak, stupid and "inferior". He even goes so far as to steal her body so he could find a "superior" body for himself while leaving her in his corpse. However, it doesn't stick.
- Albinos Are Freaks: This is a sore spot for Vin as she has experienced prejudice against her for her being born albino, like her mother before her.
- Ambiguous Situation:
- Invoked and subverted. Vin isn't sure whether or not her encounter with Horror in the forest after running away from Azzie's cottage was real or imagined, though Azzie's subsequent letter reveals it was real and that Vin saved her from getting eaten.
- The epilogue of the novel skips to the 1950s, when the FBI raid the cottage to find the now-elderly Lavinia and a fully transformed Asenath together. Azzie takes Vin and flees before the agents can attack, diving into the ocean, and pursuing agents are blinded by a strange light that come down from the sky—implying that Yog-Sothoth interceded to save his ex.
- Apologizes a Lot: Vin has a really bad habit of apologizing every time she says or does something she perceives wasn't right. Azzie calls her out on it after a while, which helps Vin grow out of it.
- Body Horror: Over the course of the story, Azzie experiences the warning signs of her physical transformation into a Deep One, like her mother before her. Vin eventually notices these and does her best to help her through it.
- Content Warnings: The author warns of disturbing content that would make readers uncomfortable in the novel, from abuse to body issues.
- Dies Differently in Adaptation: In The Thing on the Doorstep, Daniel Upton kills Ephraim Waite to prevent him from walking free in his friend's body. Here, however, Azzie killed her father herself by shooting him and then cremating the body he took over for good measure.
- Epistolary Novel: The entire story is told through the letters between Vin and Azzie as they share their experiences, hopes and struggles with their personal traumas.
- Fantastic Angst: Azzie suffers from dysphoria as a result of her father having taken over her body for twelve years, leaving her trapped in his rotting corpse for much of that time. She notes that she became promiscuous afterwards in an attempt to prove to herself that her body was still hers, and worries that her proclivity for masculine clothing and smoking are due to a psychic residue of the incident. Undergoing a painful metamorphosis into a Deep One only makes matters worse for her, though Vin is able to help her.
- Grand Theft Me: Azzie's father pulled this on her with the intention of finding a "superior" body for himself while getting rid of Azzie herself. However, Azzie manages to free herself from her father's corpse and take back her own body years later.
- Half-Human Hybrid:
- Azzie is the daughter of a human man and a Deep One, and spends most of the novel slowly metamorphosing into one herself.
- Vin's sons Wilbur and Horror are half human and half Outer God, Wilbur having been mostly human, and Horror having taken more after his father.
- Human Sacrifice: This fate almost befell Vin at the hands of her own father and the people of Dunwich, but her son Wilbur warned her about it, giving her the chance to escape. It's later revealed that Vin's mother was also sacrificed to Yog-Sothoth.
- Interspecies Romance: A lesbian variant. Vin slowly falls in love with Azzie, who is a descendant of the Deep Ones from Innsmouth.
- Irony: Azzie's father vacated her body due to his misogynistic belief that it was inherently inferior to a male one, but her metamorphosis into a Deep One makes her stronger and faster than any human, and functionally immortal as well.
- Locked Out of the Loop:
- Azzie attempted to do this when she learned via newspaper that Vin's son, Wilbur, was killed by guard dogs at Miskatonic University just to protect Vin's feelings. This backfired on her, however, when she finds out anyway.
- Averted by Vin. When she picks up a newspaper about the raid on Innsmouth, she shows Azzie the news as she didn't want to keep her in the dark since the town involved Azzie's mother.
- Masculine–Feminine Gay Couple: Vin is the feminine with her girlish personality and her preference of wearing dresses, while Azzie is the masculine with her stoic personality and tendency to wear men's clothes.
- Missing Mom:
- Vin's mother was killed years prior to the story by the townsfolk, leaving her with an abusive father.
- Azzie's mother was shut away for years due to her change into a Deep One. Azzie last knew that she was headed to Innsmouth, but whether her mother survived the raid or not is left up in the air.
- No Biological Sex: Azzie notes that Deep Ones don't have a set gender and can shift to be male or female as the reproductive need arises.
- Ominous Hair Loss: Over a period of time, Azzie noticed that her hair has been falling out in larger quantities without new ones growing out, the first clue to her progressive transformation into a Deep One.
- Parental Incest: A non-consensual, abusive type. While channeling the Outer God he worships; Vin's father raped her for the purpose of producing the children of Yog-Sothoth.
- Patricide: Once she finally managed to take back her own body, Azzie took this opportunity to kill her father (who had already claimed a new body for himself) and cremate the body to get rid of him for good.
- Secretly Dying: As her metamorphosis progresses, Azzie suffers extreme pain and bouts of weakness that she realizes will eventually kill her unless she returns to the ocean, but attempts to keep this secret and suffer through them as long as she can so as to not be parted from Vin. Vin ultimately realizes what's going on and calls her out on it.
- Slow Transformation: Due to her Innsmouth heritage, Azzie slowly and painfully transforms from a human into a Deep One over the course of the six months covered by the novel—losing her hair, having a dorsal fin erupt from her back, having chunks of skin slough off to reveal scales, having her teeth fall out to be replaced by fangs, and having webbing form between her fingers and toes.
- Spared by the Adaptation: Vin and Azzie, unlike in Lovecraft's original stories (Lavinia supposedly dies at Wilbur's hands and Asenath has her body stolen by her father and left to die), survive and try to establish a new life.
- The Tooth Hurts: Later on, Azzie experiences pains in her mouth from losing her teeth as one of the stages of her transformation. Worse, her new fangs don't fit properly in her still-human mouth and Vin has to file them down to keep her from injuring herself.
- To Serve Man: After Azzie—who'd mostly metamorphosed from human to Deep One—kills Dr. Philips for having attacked Vin, she loses control of her predatory instincts and starts eating his body before Vin is able to bring her back to her senses.
- Violently Protective Girlfriend: A lesbian variant. When Dr. Philips comes to the house to find Azzie drastically transformed and threatens Vin under the superstitious assumption she did something, Azzie attacks and kills Dr. Philips in a berserk rage. Vin is surprised to find she finds Azzie's feral side kinda sexy.
- What You Are in the Dark: After learning of Wilbur's death and that Azzie tried to keep it from her, Vin runs away from the cottage and returns to the forest outside Dunwich, where she encounters her surviving son Horror and contemplates calling upon Yog-Sothoth to take her away from the Earth so she won't have to suffer anymore. She then has the epiphany that she would have to sacrifice Azzie the way her father sacrificed her mother and tried to sacrifice her in order to make it happen, and balks at doing so even though she's still furious at Azzie. Horror attempts to eat Azzie—who followed after Vin to apologize—but Vin stops him, though she dismisses the incident as a bout of despair and exhaustion-induced delirium.
