A student of Native American lore investigates shadowy tales of the snake god of an extinct tribe of the Great Plains. His inquiry uncovers an account from 1889 of settlers homesteading in the Indian Territories of Oklahoma. A pervasive fear of snakes nudges a simple settler towards madness. Are his fears of the dreaded snake god just the result of hearing old stories, or is a new story unfolding as Yig's curse takes hold? “The Curse of Yig” is rather an outlier among the tales of HPL. Going far from the comfortable backdrop of New England, Lovecraft made use of a setting in rural Oklahoma and created a new deity for his pantheon of Great Old Ones—the serpent god Yig. The story came about as a collaboration—of a sort—between Lovecraft and one of his revision clients, Zealia Bishop. Zealia sent HPL the germ of a story learned from her grandmother Compton, who lived in the Oklahoma territory in the late 1800s, and HPL developed it into something much richer and more satisfying.
Author
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction. Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality. Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe. — Wikipedia
