H. P. Lovecraft's The Tomb: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis

The very first of Lovecraft’s mature works, “The Tomb” was written in 1917 at the age of twenty-seven, but not published – perhaps understandably – until he had begun to carve out a reputation with such worthier stories as “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” “The Doom that Came to Sarnath,” and “The Music of Erich Zann.” To be fair, Lovecraft succeeded in publishing a few even more esoteric, self-indulgent works before “The Tomb,” but this is certainly among his stories (commendable though I would argue it ultimately is) which are considered an acquired taste.

At the core, it is fascinating, creepy, and imaginative, but it suffers from some of the worst wordiness and smug self-satisfaction in his entire, smarmy corpus. It is entirely written – with obvious pride and panache – in florid, self-indulgent language which comes across as either a well-read introvert’s desperate cry for attention or the intentionally obtuse writings of an insufferable elitist armed with a thesaurus (you be the judge). Considering that it was his first adult work, however, anyone who has ever been brave enough to write fiction should be willing to lend him grace.

II.

Written just barely on the other side of what was arguably the most desperate, depressing period of Lovecraft’s life (more on that in the analysis), he was inspired to resume writing as an adult during a stroll through one of Providence’s oldest cemeteries with his aunt. While there, he paused at the decomposing headstone of Simon Smith, an ancestor of his who had died in 1711.

While gazing upon the sunken spot where Smith’s bones lay, he recorded the following thought: “Why could I not talk with him, and enter more intimately into the life of my chosen age?” Lovecraft infamously felt – like many people (see: Midnight in Paris) – that he would have been happier and more understood in another era, specifically the early Enlightenment of Georgian New England (ca. 1714 – 1776).

Homesick for a time he would never be able to experience, he penned “The Tomb,” creating a protagonist which – for all his smug wordiness – is rated among his most unique and honest, one whom Kenneth Hite describes as “surprisingly well-developed for an HPL character, and amazing for an early HPL character, possibly because, as Joshi theorizes, he’s a thinly disguised version of Lovecraft himself.”

Indeed, outside of Randolph Carter or some of the protagonists of the Dream Cycle, I think it impossible to imagine a character of his more closely and authentically aligned to his own interior life: lonely, insecure, wistful, and desperate to feel alive – entirely lacking the stoic, self-preserving cynicism which Lovecraft’s characters would adopt in the future.   

III.

That it owes its origins to Poe has been exhaustively commented upon (Hite calls this story the work of a “prolix, Poe-wannabe,” and Joshi considers it “one of [his] most Poe-esque stories” – which is saying something) but the connection cannot possibly be overlooked. Its focus on family curses, divine destruction, obsessive compulsion, moral decadence, aristocratic depravity, esoteric orgies, insidious doppelgängers, premature burials, skulking in graveyards, the violation of said graves, necrophilia, reincarnation, and the social alienation of a misunderstood, aristocratic boy who despises society, is obsessed with death, and pores over niche topics and ancient tomes is vintage Poe (right down to the Latin epigram and unreliable narrator writing from an asylum).

I could list all Poe’s stories and poems which influenced this tale, but I’ll limit myself to the most obvious: “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Annabel Lee,” “Metzengerstein,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “Ligeia,” “Morella,” “Ulalume,” and “Berenice” (there are at least a dozen more that spring to mind). As a Poe pastiche, it is unquestionably successful, and after successive readings – as one learns to come to terms with the narrator’s cringy way with words – it increases in effectiveness.

Although admittedly over-the-top, its central story of a lonely latch-key boy lurking around a beckoning tomb is, frankly, creepier than all but Poe’s most chilling stories, and although it doesn’t quite rise to the levels of It or The Shining, there is no question that the grisly implications to which Lovecraft barely hints – but has the amazing discipline to hold back from us – are on par with the great, early epics of Stephen King, all in under a dozen pages of purple prose. 

SUMMARY

Our Poe-esque protagonist, Jervas Dudley, recounts his descent into madness, caused by a mysterious tomb he discovered during his childhood. The story is framed within the context of Dudley's current confinement in a mental institution, and the narrator is aware that his tale may be doubted because of his present state. He begins by describing the skepticism of the majority regarding extraordinary phenomena, noting that those with broader intellects understand that reality and unreality are often indistinguishable, a theme that permeates the entire narrative.

From an early age, Jervas Dudley was a dreamer, often detached from the world around him. He lived in a wealthy family but was uninterested in social conventions, spending his time reading ancient books and wandering the natural world surrounding his ancestral home. He was fascinated by a certain wooded hollow near his home, which contained a mysterious tomb—the tomb of the Hydes, an old and once prestigious family.

The family mansion had burned down many years before, leaving the tomb as the sole remaining landmark of the Hydes' presence in the area. The tomb, located on a hill in a secluded part of the forest, had a foreboding and sinister appearance. Its entrance was a stone door with rusted iron hinges, held ajar by chains and padlocks.

The tomb intrigued Dudley from the moment he stumbled upon it, though at first, he did not associate it with death or anything sinister. To him, it was just a curiosity.

However, his obsession with it grew over time. He spent months trying unsuccessfully to force the padlocks and learn more about the tomb's history. Dudley’s strange temperament and interests led him to hear rumors about the Hydes' family legacy, including dark rituals and godless revelries that had taken place in the long-destroyed mansion. These stories only deepened his fascination with the tomb, and he began to feel a growing connection to it, convinced that it held some profound meaning for him.

The more time Dudley spent thinking about the tomb, the more he began to feel as if it was his destiny to enter it.

His curiosity grew stronger, and one night, after years of watching the tomb from the outside, he was drawn in by an inexplicable impulse to enter. Dudley recalled the legend from Plutarch’s Lives, which spoke of a hero who was destined to lift a great stone when he was old enough.

This myth seemed to symbolize Dudley’s growing sense of destiny, as he believed that his time had not yet come to enter the tomb but that it would eventually. Eventually, he did make attempts to open the tomb, but he was always frustrated by the heavy chains and locks that barred his entry.

Dudley’s obsession deepened, and he began to spend more time alone at night in churchyards and other burial places, learning disturbing and forgotten details about the dead. The tomb continued to haunt his thoughts, and one day, after reading about Theseus’s legendary stone in Plutarch’s Lives, he began to feel a strange connection to the Hydes. He believed that the tomb was his heritage and that, as the last of the Hyde bloodline, he had a right to the tomb.

By the time he reached adulthood, Dudley’s connection to the tomb had grown even stronger. He formed a ritual of lying by the tomb’s door in a "bower" made of vegetation, contemplating the place that seemed to call out to him. It was during one such vigil that he experienced his first revelation.

One sultry night, he heard voices coming from the tomb—voices that seemed to encompass various historical dialects from New England’s past. He barely registered this at first, but the eerie nature of the voices seemed to mark a turning point in his obsession. The next day, Dudley was able to find the key to the tomb, which allowed him to finally enter it.

When Dudley finally enters the tomb, he describes the overwhelming sense of familiarity that washed over him as he descended the damp, dark steps. The interior of the tomb was filled with marble slabs and coffins, some intact, others reduced to dust. He found one casket that bore the name of Sir Geoffrey Hyde, one of the family’s ancestors.

This discovery further solidified his connection to the tomb. In a moment of strange impulse, he climbed into one of the vacant coffins and lay there in the darkness, as if claiming it as his own.

Afterward, Dudley began to exhibit strange behaviors. His speech became more archaic, and his personality shifted dramatically. He began to speak with a wit and a cynicism that were completely unlike his previous introspective and solitary nature. One morning, at breakfast, he recited a bawdy poem, filled with the carefree language of a different era:

"Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,

And drink to the present before it shall fail;

Pile each on your platter a mountain of beef,

For 'tis eating and drinking that bring us relief..."

His behavior became more erratic as he embraced an almost hedonistic lifestyle, reveling in his newfound confidence and shamelessness. However, this change also brought with it a growing terror of fire and thunderstorms. He developed an intense fear of such phenomena, even though he had never been concerned about them in the past. He frequently visited the ruins of the burned mansion, imagining it in its former glory. This obsession with the house's destruction soon merged with his dread of fire, and he began to feel an unnatural connection to the catastrophic event that had once destroyed the mansion.

Eventually, Dudley’s behavior became so peculiar that his parents grew alarmed. They began to watch him more closely, and one day, Dudley became aware that a spy had seen him visiting the tomb. He was terrified that his secret would be revealed. But a strange turn of events saved him: the spy mistakenly reported that Dudley had only been lying outside the tomb, not entering it. This mistake emboldened Dudley, and he returned to the tomb, believing that some supernatural force was protecting him.

The final horror came when Dudley’s obsession led him to a violent and tragic event. He was drawn once more to the ruined mansion during a thunderstorm. As he entered the house in a trance-like state, he was confronted with a vision of the mansion’s former glory, full of revelers, wine, and music. But this vision was short-lived, as a violent thunderstorm struck the house, setting it ablaze once again. Dudley, now fully consumed by his obsession, remained inside the house as it burned, seemingly content to perish with the mansion.

However, as the house burned, Dudley experienced a moment of intense fear. He realized that if he died in the fire, he would never be able to rest in the tomb of the Hydes. This fear drove him into a frenzy as he struggled against the inevitable. In the chaos, he was restrained and brought back to the mental institution, where he now resides.

The final twist occurs when Dudley’s servant, Hiram, breaks into the tomb and finds an empty coffin with the name "Jervas" inscribed on it. This discovery, combined with the strange events of Dudley’s life, leaves him uncertain whether he is truly mad or whether some supernatural force is at work.

The story ends ambiguously, with Dudley’s fate left unclear, as he is now confined in the asylum, surrounded by those who doubt his experiences. But Hiram's discovery of the empty coffin with his name suggests that Dudley may have been connected to the tomb in ways he never fully understood, possibly even predestined to become part of the Hyde family legacy.

ANALYSIS

Although Lovecraft wrote a good number of stories (some quite decent) during his boyhood and teens – beginning with “The Noble Eavesdropper” and “The Little Glass Bottle,” written at seven years of age – he ceased writing at the age of seventeen, initiating a hiatus that would continue for a decade until it was broken by “The Tomb” in 1917. The decade between these stories was a murky and depressing one, which would go on to inspire “The Tomb” nearly as much as Poe himself.

His childhood had already been severely blighted by trauma, beginning with his father’s institutionalization, and the death of his grandmother, which shuttled his family into what he termed a profound “gloom from which it never fully recovered.” This was followed by the loss of his grandfather’s fortune (which led to the dismissal of the family servants – yes, Lovecraft actually did grow up with servants), the public shame of his family’s fall from prominence, his grandfather’s death from a stroke (brought on by shame and anxiety from his business catastrophes), and the subsequent loss of the family estate.

It was at this point that young Howard ceased writing, overwhelmed – at the age of eighteen – with suicidal thoughts, and shoved to the brink of a mental collapse by the stress and uncertainty of his family’s situation. As the only surviving male, he should have been able, so he thought, to provide for his mother and aunts – the “man of the house” – but his ambitions and hopes were swallowed up in insecurity and instability. Before he could even graduate high school, he was overwhelmed by a “sort of a breakdown” which he describes as a “general nervous weakness which prevent[ed] my continuous application to any thing.”

His plans to apply to Brown University were dashed, and the well-read, patrician-tongued Lovecraft would die without ever attending another day of classes – an unemployed high school dropout living with his impoverished family, too overwhelmed with his own insecurities and pride to find work to support his equally unindustrious kinswomen.

II.

The next five years have precious little documentation: we only know that his family fell more deeply into poverty, that further business failures hounded his uncle, that he avoided leaving the house, except at night, because he was “so hideous that he hid from everyone and did not like to walk upon the streets where people could gaze on him,” and that he and his mother would recite passages of Shakespeare tragedies so violently that the next-door neighbors mistook them for domestic screaming matches (or at least that’s what Lovecraft claimed the neighbors were overhearing: his mother was certainly not a kind or gentle woman, and their relationship was notoriously stressful).

During this period, he tried to study chemistry and astronomy but was overwhelmed with the necessary mathematics, and in his frustration, turned to writing aggressively racist poems with such uplifting titles as “New-England Fallen” and “On the Creation of Niggers,” including a piece of white supremacist sci-fi called “Providence in 2000 AD” which depicts a new millennium where Anglo-Saxon Protestants have been overtaken by hordes of nasty Jews and Catholics.

He was severely unwell.

He turned to reading amateur pulp magazines and was elevated to cult status in this small, niche realm because of his vicious letters to the editor, which roasted the style of one of the leading contributors, which he considered “effeminate,” “coarse,” and “proper to negroes and anthropoid apes.” Burning with pent-up aggression, searing misanthropy, and an aimless intellect thirsty to spar, Lovecraft began writing reams of letters to the editor, goaded by his rabid fanbase.

It was in this frame of mind, teetering between the darkest years of his life – hounded by family ruin, personal shame, and the shadow of suicide – and his meteoric rise in the commentariat of pulp periodicals that Lovecraft penned the first story in a decade. While many of his tales have been described as “autobiographical,” few have the profound intimacy and authenticity of this one: there are no exotic adventures to distant deserts or submarine cities, no extraterrestrial monsters, and no indulgent escapades into fanciful alternate dimensions accessed through moonbeam bridges.

Even the Gothic locale lacks some ghoulish portal to a cyclopean, subterranean metropolis (cf. “The Nameless City,” “The Rats in the Walls,” “Randolph Carter”). Perhaps this can be criticized as a deficit in imagination, and surely these later stories succeed in large part due to their vast worlds, exoticism, and suggestiveness, but there is truly something unnerving about the simplicity of this first adult work.

III.

In spite of all my criticism of Lovecraft’s lofty language and self-indulgence in “The Tomb,” there is no question that its grim allegory of hereditary guilt, reincarnated evil, spiritual alienation, and fate is one of his most vulnerable and haunting efforts. Like the works of Poe, it succeeds in its emotional honesty and in the Hawthornean eloquence of its literary design. Doubtless, this Victorian homage encumbers it with an antiquated vibe, but this is natural for a story whose focus is anchored in the ennui of feeling that you are out of place in the age where you were born.

Instead of concerning itself with the macrocosmic plight of humanity, it focuses on the microcosmic degeneration of a single boy – lonely, isolated, and doomed – who gave up all hopes of being accepted by his peers long before he has had a chance to experience the disappointments and existential woes of adulthood, one who found more comfort and acceptance in the cold embrace of his forefathers’ crumbling tomb. Here there is a place for him – a vacancy with his name on it – but in the mortal world, his dangerous adventures are not noticed until they have become truly horrifying.

Indeed, Lovecraft laces this story with a wide range of disturbing implications, barely hinted at through disciplined suggestions, namely that he is spending very… tangible time with the corpses of his predecessors. When surrounded by the ghosts of the party-goers in a climax which prefigures The Shining’s spectral ballroom, he recognizes their faces, though he notes that he “should have known them better had they been shrivelled or eaten away by death and decomposition” – the charnel state in which he first met them.

What exactly he has been up to with these cadavers is only hinted at, but Lovecraft – writing while barely on the other side of a mental breakdown, dogged by suicidal urges, humiliated by his poverty, and enflamed with rage – leaves us with no doubt that Jervas has found more love, joy, and acceptance from the shriveled skeletons of a previous century.

Like them, he has been neglected and forgotten, punished by heaven (like the fallen Lovecraft family), and written off by a ceaselessly progressive society that has no need for a dated relic like young Howard Lovecraft. As a result – regardless of the immaturity of the prose and the insufferable voice of its “Mary Sue” protagonist – “The Tomb” remains one of Lovecraft’s most strikingly vulnerable works, and, I would argue, his most tragic.    

You can read the original story HERE!

And you can find our annotated and illustrated edition of Lovecraft's best Gothic horror stories HERE!