The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

Set in Providence, Rhode Island, the story concerns the fate of Charles Dexter Ward, a young man from a well-to-do family who has disappeared from a mental asylum.  The family doctor searches for Ward, learning in the process that he spent several years looking for the grave of his malignant ancestor Joseph Curwen--a necromancer and mass murderer rumored to have resurrected the dead to torture secrets from them.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction.  As early as the 1940s, Lovecraft's work had developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fiction featuring a pantheon of humanity-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. Stephen King called Lovecraft "the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale."