THE DEEP ONES: "The Curse of Yig" by Zealia Bishop and H. P. Lovecraft

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THE DEEP ONES: "The Curse of Yig" by Zealia Bishop and H. P. Lovecraft

2SRB5729
Jan 27, 2025, 1:28 pm

I don't have a love for frontier based stories but I did find this one compelling. Parts felt a little repetitive, however, perhaps that was to drive home the relentlessness of Yig and the Indian protective response. The ending surprised me regarding the husband, even though somebody may be able to guess the fate of the characters. The very end was a well done shocker. It was not what I had expected.

3AndreasJ
Jan 27, 2025, 1:35 pm

It’s not the 29th quite yet :)

(That said, this is presumably a re-read for most of us, so little risk of spoiling anything.)

4SRB5729
Jan 27, 2025, 3:27 pm

Sorry about that. In my passion to make sure i participated, I jumped the gun. I will be more careful going forward.

5RandyStafford
Jan 30, 2025, 6:02 pm

I read this about 20 years ago and didn't have favorable memories of it.

This time, though, I found it more impressive. Apart from Audrey's monsterous offspring, Bishop and Lovecraft straddle the materialist-supernatural line well. Those three children of Yig are hard -- but not impossible -- to explain without believing in the curse of Yig.

I thought the local color -- geography and history -- was well done. I'm assuming Bishop supplied most of that.

This bit struck me as a rather disconcerting cultural aspect from the past: "“Maybe the ethics of the near future will let us give it a merciful release, but it’s hard to tell.”

6AndreasJ
Jan 31, 2025, 2:50 am

I was delayed in re-reading this by the whole new work page thing.

To my mind, this is much the best of the three Bishop-Lovecraft collaborations. Acc'd Joshi's notes in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, Bishop's role was equally slight in all three, so I wouldn't necessarily assume the local colour (the accuracy of which I have no way to judge) is due to her.

The shocker at the end is a bit unusual for Lovecraft - he often foreshadows the final revelation to the point it's no surprise. But the actually unexpected twist here works very well I think.

I might add that sober scholars of Mesoamerican religion have suggested that the Quetzalcoatl of actual pre-Columbian belief was less unambiguously benign than portrayed in post-Conquest accounts - the native informants may have sanitized him to make native religion seem less barbaric to the Spanish.

Speaking of the Bishop-Lovecraft collaborations, we 've now done two of them, this and "The Mound". Should we do "Medusa's Coil" next season? It's the weakest of three (or so I thought when I read it some twenty years ago), but of some interest from a mytho(s)poetic perspective, with its portrayal of R'lyeh. It's online at Wikisource.

7SRB5729
Feb 2, 2025, 4:46 pm

>6 AndreasJ: I would like to read Medusa's Coil.

8AndreasJ
Feb 2, 2025, 11:40 pm

Feel free to nominate it when the next planning thread comes around :)

9ScoLgo
Edited: Feb 3, 2025, 1:13 am

>7 SRB5729: Gemma Files wrote a response story to Medusa's Coil, titled Hairwork, (sorry, no LT touchstone).

Published in several anthologies: https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1921258

Discussion, with spoilers: https://reactormag.com/medusas-side-of-the-story-gemma-filess-hairwork/

10SRB5729
Feb 4, 2025, 12:05 pm

>9 ScoLgo: Thanks much for the information. I just boxed up 6 storage boxes of books to create a "less cluttered" look in our office. I sense that I will be creating a garage library to manage that look now. Lots of anthologies to work through again.

11SRB5729
Feb 4, 2025, 10:31 pm

>9 ScoLgo: I will say nothing more, but I did go read Medusa's coil and the Gemma Filess story. Would be good discussion stories here.