Quote:
Originally Posted by UnderTheOath  Opinions on 'The Curse of Yig'?
I personally loved it. But he co-wrote it, correct? |
Ummm, not really:
Quote:
|
By the way -- if you want to see a new story which is practically mine, read The Curse of Yig in the new Weird Tales, next your [Clark Ashton Smith's] verses. The "authoress", Mrs. Reed is a client for whom [Frank Belknap] Long & I have done lots of work, & this specimen is well-nigh a piece of original composition on my part, since all I had to go by was a synopsis of notes describing a pioneer couple, the attack on the husband by snakes, the bursting of his corpse in the dark, & the subsequent madness of the wife. All the plot & motivation in the present tale are my own -- I invented the snake-god, the curse, the prologue & epilogue, the point about the identity of the corpse, & the monstrously suggestive aftermath. To all intents & purposes it's my story -- though not my latest, for I wrote The Dunwich Horror afterward.
|
-- Selected Letters II, pp. 29-30
While it has some flaws, and occasional laxness in prose (something one finds now and again in his revision work, as opposed to his own original tales), it's a very fine tale of grisly horror, all right, and I find it retains a good deal of its power upon repeated readings....