The Tomb (1917)

by H.P. Lovecraft

It’s incredibly fitting that this is the first Lovecraft story he wrote as an adult. "The Tomb" is written from the point of view of a mental patient who has seen something incredible and unbelievable, and in the prologue Lovecraft virtually sets out his vision for writing, a mission statement of sorts about the kind of horror stories he wants to write.

        It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental
        vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena,
        seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its
        common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp         distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do
        only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through
        which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the
        majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate
        the common veil of obvious empiricism.

This is a wonderful statement that gets to the heart of Lovecraft’s fiction, that the visible world represents only one aspect of the universe and that so much more unexplained phenomenon and, indeed, worlds of madness and destruction lie beyond. His characters, then, through diligent study or curious circumstances, find themselves peering into a doorway to another dimension and rarely emerge unscathed.

The tale itself is of one, Jervas Dudley, son of a wealthy couple who live next to a ruined mansion that was destroyed by a lightning bolt that burned it to the ground killing the inhabitants. Adjacent to the property is a crypt that is surrounded by a gate and covered over with growth. Dudley as a youth was not interested in the physical world and studied ancient texts and wandered around the grounds of his home pondering them. It was on one of these walks that he stumbles across the tomb and finds it locked by a rusty lock and chain. Beyond the gate, however, he sees that the door to the vault is tantalizingly ajar. Too big to fit through the gate, from that day forward he becomes obsessed with discovering what is in the tomb and sits for hours outside the gate trying to figure out how to get inside. “In that instant of curiosity was born the madly unreasoning desire which has brought me to this hell of confinement.”

Essentially this is a ghost story. The only real horror--and it’s not all that horrifying--is when Dudley grows to young adulthood and is given a message from inside the crypt. In following its direction, leads him to a key. “I must have fallen asleep from fatigue, for it was with a distinct sense of awakening that I heard the voices . . . I was greatly and permanently changed that night. Upon returning home I went with much directness to a rotting chest in the attic, wherein I found the key which next day unlocked with ease the barrier I had so long stormed in vain.” When he goes into the tomb the next day, he descends the stairs and looks around at the coffins in various states of decay. The horrific element of the story comes when he finds an empty coffin and begins spending his days lying inside of it. “Henceforward I haunted the tomb each night; seeing, hearing, and doing things I must never reveal.” At first he was alarmed because there was someone watching him as he came and went from the crypt, but since the man didn’t tell his parents he figured that somehow he wasn’t actually being seen, invisible from the watcher.

The climax of the story takes place not in the tomb, but in the ruins next door. When a storm rolls in one night, the destruction of the mansion is relived by Dudley in the midst of ghostly dinner party. This is the reason for his eventual incarceration as his father and the watcher accost him on the ruined property and have him committed. But it’s the denouement that is the real chilling aspect of the tale and a fitting ending. If there’s a flaw in the story it’s probably the bawdy song that Lovecraft inserts in the middle that supposedly is something Dudley picked up from the ghostly entities in the tomb, but in the conceit of the story it is more likely that Dudley is somehow a reincarnation of the ancient family destroyed in the fire. It’s easy to be critical of a story like this, especially considering that it’s Lovecraft’s first. But few critics have ever attempted to write anything of their own. What "The Tomb" lacks in polish it makes up for in inventiveness, and the Lovecraft style and narrative touch that imbue it with the kind of eldritch flavor he’s so well know for. Ultimately it’s a solid early tale that is a harbinger of greater works to come.