Lovecraft’s third short story is his best yet. Offering a grim tale that focuses on the protagonist’s increasing obsession with the dead, The Tomb only falters with its anticlimactic ending.

What most stands out at the beginning of The Tomb is how the narrator now has a distinct voice. From the first paragraphs alone we already become well acquainted with one of his major traits: his arrogance.

The story begins with the narrator telling that he’s locked in a mental hospital, which he guarantees is a small detail that doesn’t make him an unreliable narrator in any shape or form. According to him, he’s not mad, but better: he claims to able to notice and understand things normal people cannot. He’s a “dreamer and a visionary” that have “flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism,” because “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” – a sentence that perfectly exposes one of the most current themes in Lovecraft’s work: the notion that reality is an illusion, just a vision distorted by our incapacity of dealing with what actually lies in front of us. It’s only fitting, then, that Lovecraft’s first character to be able to see beyond that distortion, to observe what lies beyond the veil of consciousness, starts the story locked up inside a madhouse.

And that madness can be clearly felt in the narrative. Early on, for example, when he’s speaking about the woods near his home, he keeps describing this sinister location – where the trees are “grotesquely gnarled” – and he’s just starting to give it a grounded sense of place, when he quickly swift gears and talks about how he used to watch dryads dancing wildly in the woods, suddenly putting the fantastic into focus, right before he finally mentions the tomb that gives the story its title. The paragraph has a perfect movement: it starts about loneliness and the dead, moves on to a macabre setting, inserts the fantastic, and finally ends with the tomb: a place that encapsulates all the former elements.

The tomb is an eerie, gloomy place that has an immediate effect on the protagonist – who here is finally named, Jervas Dudley – enchanting him completely. It’s a place of death, of lost history and decay, and Jervas seems hopelessly attracted to it, despite being unable to find a way to enter the carefully fastened place. He’s just ten when he discovers the tomb and is twenty-one when he finally manages to solve its puzzle – with the Tomb’s help no less. After all, when he’s near the tomb, he’s always “thinking strange thoughts and dreaming strange dreams.” The tomb starts to mold Jervas, altering his tone of voice, his accent, his gait, his knowledge, and his memories. It’s not surprising, then, when he claims that one day he started to hear voices – which he’s neither able nor willing to describe – telling him where the key to the tomb is.

This deeper connection between character and place, in which the latter transforms the former, was what formed the twist in Lovecraft’s first story, The Beast in the Cave, but here it’s more than a twist, it’s the beating heart of the narrative. The more Jervas becomes immersed in the tomb, the more the tomb makes him look and sound like he’s part of it; like he’s one of its dead – which leads us to the ending that, while very anticlimactic since the beginning suggests something big will happen, is nonetheless fitting: inside the tomb, they discover an empty coffin with Jervas’ name on it, and the protagonist becomes peaceful with the certainty that he, one fateful day, is going to be buried there, resting alongside the other dead, finally becoming the tomb’s.

The Tomb is a not an excellent story – the protagonist’s arrogance doesn’t lead anywhere, for example – but it’s very competent in crafting its main theme, with a tale that shows how the environment can transform and devour the man – here almost literally, claiming his body for itself.

June 05, 2020.