In the Vault

Written by H. P. Lovecraft

Narrated by Cathy Dobson

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), who wrote as H. P. Lovecraft, was an American writer who achieved posthumous fame through his brilliant and highly influential works of horror fiction.

In the Vault tells the tale of a lazy and parsimonious undertaker who tries to skimp on the cost of a coffin by reusing a substandard, cheap box which he had made previously for a very short man. The recipient of the flimsy coffin is the vindictive farmer Asaph Sawyer, a man known in the neighbourhood to be permanently set on vengeance on anyone who slights him....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Door Consulting
• Release date: Jun 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781467698818

H. P. Lovecraft

Renowned as one of the great horror-writers of all time, H.P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. Among his many classic horror stories, many of which were published in book form only after his death in 1937, are ‘At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror’ (1964), ‘Dagon and Other Macabre Tales’ (1965), and ‘The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions’ (1970).

Reviews for In the Vault

[aneris-3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After a horrible winter that caused the earth to freeze so the people from Peck Valley, New England, couldn’t bury anyone, a lazy undertaker George Birch has to prepare the stored coffins for normal funeral. He gets stuck for nine hours in a tomb thanks to a tomb door he should have fixed ages ago.
He doesn't expect anything more than an inconvenient and physically exhausting afternoon and possibly night.

Even though Lovecraft may have not intended this to be funny, he acknowledges its comedic side.'Mention a bucolic Yankee setting, a bungling and thick-fibred village undertaker,and a careless mishap in a tomb, and no average reader can be brought to expect more than a hearty albeit grotesque phase of comedy.' The story is a combination of humour and dread.

[altheaann · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A re-read (I've read this one more than once before).

An undertaker accidentally locks himself inside a tomb full of coffins awaiting burial. Although he's an unimaginative, workman-like sort - not one to be bothered by the proximity of corpses - after what transpires that night, he'll never be the same.

Objectively, this is an exceedingly well-crafted piece, but the 'big reveal' just doesn't bother me as much as it's clearly supposed to. It's predicated on an assumption of a religious belief in the necessity of the integrity of dead bodies. If you're one of those people who believes that your body needs to be interred intact in order to be resurrected at the end of days, then yes, you will find the undertaker's 'transgression' disturbing. But I'm not one of those people.