Horror Review: "The Tomb" by H.P. Lovecraft (1917; republished 1973 by Ballantine)

The Tomb is the first piece of fiction Lovecraft completed as an adult. Written in 1917, it was not published until five years later in the March 1922 edition of "The Vagrant", an amateur press publication. The editor and publisher of "The Vagrant", a man by the name of W. Paul Cook, encouraged Lovecraft to continue honing his skill as a writer after reading through some of the stories Lovecraft had penned as a child. After The Tomb, Cook accepted and published several more of Lovecraft's pieces, and it's entirely possible Lovecraft's name would be forgotten today were it not for Cook's encouragement of the budding writer.

With this in mind, it's important to approach a review of the story with the understanding that Lovecraft was still building his abilities as a writer, and not to prejudge. In this case, I don't think it's too difficult to judge the subject matter on its own merit: despite being only twenty-six years old when he wrote it, the story bears many of the hallmarks we've come to recognize over the years of something truly Lovecraftian. Taking the cover artwork from the 1973 Ballantine paperback, this is a review of The Tomb by H. P. Lovecraft.

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In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. -- The Tomb

Lovecraft gets right to the point with the first words of this story, and it's a theme we'll see time and time again as his stories grow and expand: a narrator struggling to figure out how best to relay the bizarre tale he's about to set forth. Jervas Dudley may be the first, but he won't be the last. Introduced as a young man born into a family of considerable means, whose tastes and interests always extended toward those things considered outside the normal rage of his peer group, Dudley's a figure clearly modeled after Lovecraft himself, who from a young age was more in love with antiquity than modern-day life. But while Lovecraft finally found himself having to face the modern world in the aftermath of his parents' death, Dudley is slightly more fortunate.

During his many bouts of play around the family estate, he explored the land surrounding his home until one day, Dudley spots a strange pair of doors, chained and padlocked shut, set into the side of a hill in the middle of a wooded hollow. The discovery of this oddity sends him on a search for information, and it doesn't take long for Dudley to realize he's found the family burial tomb of the Hydes. The Hydes, as it turns out, were another well-to-do clan within the area, but were wiped out nearly to a person by a freak accident which set their house ablaze long before Dudley was born.

Further research by Dudley as the years pass reveals that he shares a minor ancestry with the Hydes, and this discovery steels his desire to get inside the tomb and explore. As luck would have it, he one day comes across the key that will allow him entry, and from there, things take a turn for the bizarre. By the time the story ends, Jervas Dudley will be locked in an asylum, watched over by a doting caretaker, but promised the one thing his heart truly desires when the end comes.

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Lovecraft set out, whether consciously or unconsciously, his own set of "rules" for composing weird fiction when he began writing it, and his dogged determination to follow those simple rules resulted in success nearly every time. The Tomb is probably the first implementation of these rules, and it benefits from them greatly.

With The Tomb, Lovecraft is very careful to explain, but not to over-explain. There's a matter-of-factness about the narrator, which helps maintain a sense of groundedness about the piece. Jervas is also careful to leave out some bits which he considers unimportant, but the fact he omits them serves to make them even more important. Jervas wants to have his cake and eat it too, telling us he did some weird things in the local graveyard but insisting they aren't germane to the story at hand. These are warning flares being sent up--that Jervas wants us to ignore them and we pointedly cannot is perhaps the narrative's strongest point.

The Tomb isn't the best thing Lovecraft ever wrote, but it was never going to be, and that's OK. What matters isn't so much how the story compares with the rest of his body of literature, but that it served to lay down the ground rules for its own author for how he would extend weird fiction beyond the likes of Poe, Blackwood, and Dunsany. In this, it succeeds far beyond the trappings of its low page count, and I highly recommend it as an entry point to anyone looking to get started in Lovecraft's ouvre.

Five gloomy sepulchers out of five.

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Best Scene:

A few pages into the story, after the discovery of the Tomb, Dudley recounts a moment of behavior utterly unlike himself where at breakfast one morning he broke into a drunken-accented impromptu pub song. The verses are ribald enough in an early 20th century sensibility, though you've likely heard far worse if you've chanced to tune into any popular music radio station in the past ten years. The brilliance, though, is just how out of place the thing is: it's something deliberately amusing in the middle of a sober recollection. That the true horror of the tale unfolds not long after this serves to underscore just how much Lovecraft understood that humor and horror, laughter and fear, are really two sides of the same coin.