I was listening to some Lovecraft on my way into work one morning, an audio recording of “In the Vault” read by Jonathan Keeble. Now, I’ve always seen this as one of Lovecraft’s more humorous works, an opinion only strengthened by the narration’s denial that any of this is funny at all. It’s one big joke at its core. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a spooky tale, but, however dark and macabre Lovecraft crafts his narrative, I can’t help but laugh at the unfortunate mortician who, in the end, is primarily the victim of his own lazy and careless character.
But, there was a line in this short piece that stuck out to me as someone trying to hone my own craft. That is, far be it from me to critique a sort of founding father of the genre I love and am inspired by and hope to one day become a contributor to, a certain phrase leapt out at me as a line I myself would not allow in my own writing if I were to catch it while editing. The line: “…binding them as if he wished to get the wounds out of sight as quickly as possible.”
Now, there’s nothing wrong with that line, per se, but for me, I feel as if that would have been a missed opportunity. Here is a place that not only could be expanded from the expository to the sensuous, it is perhaps something that, being told of I’m not sure I can rightly imagine. I hear the line and stumble out of the narrative; it is in that literal sense of the Greek word a scandal to me. I would—but Lovecraft relies heavily on exposition, and I do not want what I say to be taken as a condemnation of that.
I would, I think, choose to expand that whole paragraph into a more detailed scene, or at the least pause on those unpausing yet, I might imagine, halting hands whose old skill seems to desert them as the mind which orders them reels. What a bountiful paradox, what a perfect encapsulation of Lovecraft’s themes when the rote movements of long practice stutter on the edge of curiosity and horror; then, realization, and the quick, rushed bindings that, for their haste, must be done over again. That is the moment I fear Lovecraft left out in his perhaps too distant voice, that one last hiccup in this comedy of errors.
Tale Told 