Lovecraft was 29 years old and living with his mother. He’d lived with her his entire life. And then … she was committed to an asylum. He was all alone for the first time ever. He had a nightmare. It involved a friend, and in this dark dream the two of them went at night to a cemetery and found a crypt.
Lovecraft awoke, wrote down his dream, and decided to turn it into a story. I love the DREAM part of this story. It is very powerful. But the ‘surrounding introduction’ of the story feels completely fake and awkward.
In essence, the dream is that Lovecraft and his friend go out in the middle of the night to a Massachusetts cemetery. They struggle to pull a heavy stone slab off of an entrance to an underground complex. The friend goes down into the complex, leaving Lovecraft on the surface. The friend carries a telephone-with-wire so the two of them can talk to each other, even after the friend has trudged a full fifteen minutes into the underground complex.
Then the friend encounters something nasty. The friend never actually says what he finds. The friend just pleads with Lovecraft to run. Then the line goes silent. And then a mysterious voice tells Lovecraft that his friend has died.
Spooky, right? Really cool? And Lovecraft describes the nighttime cemetery very well.
Unfortunately, Lovecraft decides to “story-ify” this dream by setting it into a context. And the context is that Lovecraft is sitting in a Florida sheriff’s office the next day, being questioned by two police officers. Lovecraft is now telling them the tale for the 8th time, because clearly they don’t believe him. And Lovecraft recites (again) in precise detail the exact long dialogue shared, the exact details of the gravestones, etc. etc. All while these officers are actively looking for a missing, perhaps injured, person in a swamp.
That external story sucks a lot of the life out of the dream. We KNOW Lovecraft survives because he’s telling the story. It doesn’t feel very pressing as Lovecraft recites dialogue and descriptions that we know he’s already said 8 times already to the officers. And the fact that Lovecraft’s friend pleads with him for 15 minutes to run away, all the while nothing at all happening on the surface, makes any danger seem fairly distant.
I love the details in the cemetery. They feel very authentic to me, and I grew up exploring Massachusetts cemeteries with a father who adored genealogy. Those sights and smells feel authentic. But they lose their power when suddenly they’re supposed to be in a Florida swamp (with a deep subterranean lair?) and the main character is reciting them over and over again.
I do like the relationship between the two characters. They remind me of the men from The Rope by Alfred Hitchcock, which was based on a real life duo. The way one character supposedly is the ‘leader’ and pulling the other into the world of the occult. The way the ‘weaker’ man could easily have cancelled the evening’s events but actively wants to go forward.
Here’s the story to read:
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/src.aspx
Here’s my video discussion of this story.