“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.”
Jervas Dudley is a introverted, imaginative young man who, from an early age, has been fascinated by an abandoned crypt near his home. The crypt once belonged to the Hyde family, whose old mansion was destroyed centuries ago in a fire. Eventually, Jervas finds the key to the old crypt and spends much of his time there, and his personality changes rapidly as he adopts numerous habits and eccentricities of a bygone age. One day he explores the ruins of the old Hyde mansion basement, where he experiences a vision of a party hosted by Jervas Hyde two centuries earlier. The party, and the vision, ends horribly as a lightning strike burns the mansion to the ground, killing Jervas Hyde and destroying his body. The vision concluded, Jervas Dudley’s father has his son institutionalized, insisting that the Hyde family crypt has been untouched for half a century. A faithful family servant, though, assures Jervas that his vision of an unoccupied grave in the Hyde family tomb is real, and Jervas Dudley vows that he shall be buried within it.
Written in 1917 and published nearly five years later, “The Tomb” is an odd little piece. As with the best of Lovecraft’s work, it raises more questions than it answers. Unlike, say, The Call of Cthulhu or At the Mountains of Madness, however, the narrative itself feels somewhat disjointed. For me, though, the biggest problem is that the narrator and protagonist, Jervas Dudley, doesn’t so much descend into madness as plummet headlong into it, without much buildup or rationale.
Clearly, Jervas Dudley is mad, but it’s not clear how much of his experiences in the tomb and the destroyed basement are real, and how much are his delusions. The postscript where Jervas’s loyal servant confirms his visions muddies the waters further. Presumably, then, Jervas Dudley has some sort of psychic connection to Jervas Hyde, and this seems to be confirmed by the suggestion that the former’s personality is gradually supplanted by the latter. All of this is well and good, and presages, in some respects, later Lovecraft work like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The problem is, what’s the point of it all? What does Jervas Hyde want, if anything? Is there anything other than “pitiful monomania” behind Jervas Dudley’s obsession? The story feels rather slight and inconsequential, which seems at odds with the portentious language that is Lovecraft’s trademark. If anything, some of the language employed here is even more over-the-top than I expected from Lovecraft.
On the other hand, if the language is overwrought in places, it does result in some lovely images. The eponymous crypt is memorably described as “the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets,” for instance. And there’s several pieces of “Eighteenth Century bacchanalian mirth,” or, if you prefer, drinking songs.
By no means one of Lovecraft’s better works, “The Tomb” isn’t exactly bad, so much as disposable. But we’re still dealing with his early material, and the best is yet to come.
