| "In the Vault" | |
|---|---|
| Short story by H. P. Lovecraft | |
 | |
 Text available at Wikisource | |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Horror short story |
| Publication | |
| Published in | Tryout |
| Publication date | 1925 |
"In the Vault" is a short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, written on September 18, 1925, and first published in the November 1925 issue of the amateur press journal Tryout .
George Birch, an undertaker for the New England town of Peck Valley, finds himself trapped in the vault where coffins are stored during winter for burial in the spring. When Birch stacks the coffins to reach a transom window, his feet break through the lid of the top coffin, injuring his ankles and forcing him to crawl out of the vault.
Later, Dr. Davis investigates the vault, and finds that the top coffin was one of inferior workmanship, which Birch used as a repository for Asaph Sawyer, a vindictive citizen whom Birch had disliked, even though the coffin had originally been built for the much shorter Matthew Fenner. Davis finds that Birch had cut off Sawyer's feet in order to fit the body into the coffin, and the wounds on Birch's ankles are actually teeth marks.
"In the Vault" was based on a suggestion made in August 1925 by Charles W. Smith, editor of the amateur journal Tryout , which Lovecraft recorded in a letter: "an undertaker imprisoned in a village vault where he was removing winter coffins for spring burial, & his escape by enlarging a transom reached by the piling up of the coffins". [1] Lovecraft accordingly dedicated the story to Smith.
The story was rejected by Weird Tales in November 1925; according to Lovecraft, editor Farnsworth Wright feared that "its extreme gruesomeness would not pass the Indiana censorship", [2] a reference to the controversy of C. M. Eddy, Jr.'s "The Loved Dead".
After being published in Tryout, the story was submitted in August 1926 to Ghost Stories, a "very crude" pulp magazine that specialized in "true" tales of the supernatural, which also rejected it. August Derleth urged Lovecraft to resubmit the story to Weird Tales in 1931, which finally published it in its April 1932 edition. [3]
An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia calls "In the Vault" "a commonplace tale of supernatural vengeance" in which "HPL attempts unsuccessfully to write in a more homespun, colloquial vein." [3]
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American writer of weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction. He is best known for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos.
"The Call of Cthulhu" is a short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in February 1928.
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This is a complete list of works by H. P. Lovecraft. Dates for the fiction, collaborations and juvenilia are in the format: composition date / first publication date, taken from An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia by S. T. Joshi and D. E. Schultz, Hippocampus Press, New York, 2001. For other sections, dates are the time of composition, not publication. Many of these works can be found on Wikisource.
Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Weird fiction either eschews or radically reinterprets traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction, such as ghosts, vampires, and werewolves. Writers on the subject of weird fiction, such as China Miéville, sometimes use "the tentacle" to represent this type of writing. The tentacle is a limb-type absent from most of the monsters of European folklore and gothic fiction, but often attached to the monstrous creatures created by weird fiction writers, such as William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Clark Ashton Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft.
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Farnsworth Wright was the editor of the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the magazine's heyday, editing 179 issues from November 1924 to March 1940. Jack Williamson called Wright "the first great fantasy editor".
"Polaris" is a fantasy short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in 1918 and first published in the December 1920 issue of the amateur journal The Philosopher. It is the story that introduces Lovecraft's fictional Pnakotic Manuscripts, the first of his arcane tomes.
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"The Picture in the House" is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft. It was written on December 12, 1920, and first published in the July issue of The National Amateur—which was published in the summer of 1921. It was reprinted in Weird Tales in 1923 and again in 1937.
"The Strange High House in the Mist" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft. Written on November 9, 1926, it was first published in the October 1931 issue of Weird Tales. It concerns a character traveling to the titular house which is perched on the top of a cliff which seems inaccessible both by land and sea, yet is apparently inhabited.
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"The Moon-Bog" is a short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in or before March 1921. The story was first published in the June 1926 issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales.
Edwin Baird was the first editor of Weird Tales, the pioneering pulp magazine that specialized in horror fiction, as well as Detective Tales, later re-titled Real Detective Tales.
Tryout was an amateur press journal published from 1914 to 1946 by Charles W. Smith of Haverhill, Massachusetts. It was connected to the National Amateur Press Association.
The Loved Dead is a story written by C. M. Eddy Jr. in 1919. A controversial tale of necrophilia, it was published in Weird Tales bumper issue for May/July 1924.
William Paul Cook was a writer, printer and publisher. He wrote under his own name and the pseudonym Willis T. Crossman and was a leading figure in the hobbyist tradition of amateur journalism. He lived and wrote mostly in Vermont and Massachusetts.
The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre is a collection of stories by American author H. P. Lovecraft. It was first published in trade paperback by Del Rey/Ballantine in October 1982 as a volume in its Classic Library of Science Fiction, and reprinted in September 1988 and April 1995, with an ebook edition issued in November. 2002.
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