“The Secret in the Tomb” (Weird Tales, May 1935)

The unnamed narrator is the progeny of Jeremy Strange, who “fled from the Orient to seek refuge in centuried Eldertown, bringing with him the loot of many tombs and a secret for ever nameless. It was he who had built his sepulcher in the twilight woods where the witch-lights gleam, and here he had interred his own remains, shunned in death as he had been in life. But buried with him was a secret, and it was this that I had come to seek. Nor was I the first in so seeking, for my father and his father before me, indeed, the eldest of each generation back to the days of Jeremy Strange himself, had likewise sought that which was so maddeningly described in the wizard’s diary — the secret of eternal life after death. 

The musty yellowed tome had been handed down to the elder son of each successive generation, and likewise, so it seemed, the dread atavistic craving for black and accursed knowledge, the thirst for which, coupled with the damnably explicit hints set forth in the warlock’s record, had sent every one of my paternal ancestors so bequeathed to a final rendezvous in the night, to seek their heritage within the tomb. What they found, none could say, for none had ever returned.” That’s the story in a nutshell. The narrator gets the irresistible psychic call and ventures into the tomb where he meets the reanimated corpse of his ancestor who feeds on the living I order to extend its own life. Why? The answer is not clear. The narrator discovers it is all a just a trick of the mind that is easily vanquished by a bit of disbelief. The narrator escapes, bulldozes the whole place, and moves on with his life.

Okay. This story. The one that was the first one Bloch sold to Weird Tales but buy a stroke of luck, was the second published in the magazine. The story goes that Bloch had caused such an uproar in his criticism of Robert E. Howard’s work that to have “Secret” as his WT debut would have been very, very unfortunate. It is an interesting story, for sure, but it really does nothing to improve on the many, many stories that came before—many in the pages of Weird Tales and penned by Lovecraft—that walk the same path. A horrible ancestral secret? A moldering corpse in a tomb? The element that distinguishes this story—and not in a good way—that that it does what I have seen many stories written by young people do. It lacks the courage to follow through on the premise. There is some unseen threat that has consumed seven consecutive generations of the Strange family, but this latest iteration is able to overcome it fairly easily and all is well. I tell my students that you have driven through a terrible storm to the edge of a cliff, you have shown the abyss to the reader—and then you took them out for ice cream. We do get Ludvig Prinn and his famous book, Mysteries of the Worm, and so that’s no nothing. It appears on a list with HPL’s Necronomicon, Clark Ashton Smith’s The Book of Eibon, and Bloch’s Cabala of Saboth, a book that Bloch mentions again in “The Mannikin.” I really like the Wikipedia page that lists all of these Cthulhu Mythos books. You can find it here.