Book Review

The Tomb and Other Tales by H.P. Lovecraft

     H.P. Lovecraft has always evoked a wide range of responses from his readers. That may be less apparent with The Tomb and Other Tales, a collection of minor stories, odds and ends, and obscurities put together by Lovecraft’s literary executor August Derleth. Having said that, fans who read this might still feel a range of conflicting emotions.

     This short paperback anthology is comprised of three sections. The first is a collection of completed short stories that were published in pulp magazines. Most are typical, maybe even generic, Lovecraft tales. Many of them are actually algorithmically the same story written with different details. Stories like “The Tomb”, “He”, and “The Strange High House In the Mist” all involve an nondescript narrator who goes in search of some form of ancient and forbidden knowledge, ends up in a place with some creepy people who perform some ceremonial magic, and reveal to him hallucinatory terrors of another, parallel world full of weird creatures with bad intentions. “Imprisoned With the Pharaohs” also follows this template but has the unique distinction of having been ghostwritten for Harry Houdini, one of the few readers who had an admiration for Lovecraft during his lifetime. It also exemplifies the Egyptomania and Art Nouveau styles of its day. It is, however, mediocre writing, even when considering pulp standards.

     The best piece in the first section, “The Horror of Red Hook”, is, unfortunately, also the most racist. A policeman is sent to investigate some strange happenings in a sordid section of New York City. He encounters a scholar of the occult named Robert Suydam who appears to be the leader of a cult. Using some unflattering and xenophobic descriptions, it is explained that the cult is made up of Kurdish Yezidis involved in human trafficking, bootlegging, and child sacrifice. Like most of the stories in this collection, the investigation leads to underground tunnels and the horrific sites of otherworldly creatures entering our dimension. Lovecraft describes the Kurdish immigrants in distinctly negative terms; by doing so he meant to shock and horrify his audience, which was miniscule during his lifetime by the way, but those racist details, as offensive as they are, make stories like this look more dated than scary. Unpacking the racism in Lovecraft’s writing can lead you down a rabbit hole that is more nuanced and complex than one may care to admit at first.

     “The Walls of Eryx” is another one of the better stories. An astronaut explorer bushwhacks through the jungles of Venus in search of crystals that work as potent sources of energy on Earth. The crystals are worshiped by big lizard men who succeed in trapping him inside an invisible labyrinth made of a glassy, unbreakable material unknown to the people of Earth. Critics of Lovecraft may point out that Venus resembles a tropical colony that gets invaded by white people who come to take resources from the non-white inhabitants represented by the lizard men. The story has a twist though since the astronaut can not escape from the trap, and while admitting defeat, confesses that the lizard men may be of equal intelligence to people from Earth after all. He realizes that they ultimately have no right to come and steal the crystals from Venus and should, in the future, try to learn from the lizard men rather than conquering them. H.P. Lovecraft was undoubtedly racist but at least this story shows that he may have been open to alternate ways of thinking about other kinds of people if he had lived longer.

     The second section of this paperback has some of his earliest writings. They are all works of juvenilia and read exactly like what they are: the kind of stories you might find in a high school creative writing class. They are full of the types of shortcomings you would expect. They do, however, show how Lovecraft was rooted in the ideals of romanticism and neo-paganism. Therefore, they may be of interest to those who want to understand what literary strands led up to his better and more developed works.

     Surprisingly, the most interesting stories appear in the third section which contains four fragments of stories Lovecraft started and never completed. “Azathoth” is a fast-paced swirling psychedelic phantasmagoria that means little but hits you like an acid rock song from the 1960s. “The Descendant” is about a man who went crazy from studying The Necronomicon and putting its theories into practice. “The Book” continues on with a similar theme.

     H.P. Lovecraft is more or less a cult writer. The politically correct abhor him but shouldn’t they? He intended to horrify and scare his audience so at least at that level he succeeded. Snooty literary snobs condemn him for his overly long sentences, tortured grammar, and unnecessarily descriptive paragraphs about things that do not need to be described. But he did express a coherent vision of the interactions between parallel universes that is imaginative and fun to read at times. A lot of writers do that though; what makes Lovecraft unique is that he opens a window into a literary world that can be analyzed endlessly as one doorway into the tunnels of his mind lead to more and mor doorways in endless succession. It goes even deeper when you try to square Lovecraft the man with the things he wrote, only to find an odd assortment of contradictions, curiosities, and coincidences. His ideas fit snugly with psychoanalysis and read like a plunge into the human id. The theme of a dark, evil, terrifying, and violent reality that underlies our ordinary lives anticipates the works of David Lynch who took on a similar framework sixty years later. The Tomb and Other Tales will probably only appeal to diehard and fanatical fans but for those people it can provide an extra touch of insight into this notoriously fascinating author.

Lovecraft, H.P. The Tomb and Other Tales. Ballantine Books Inc., New York: 1974.