The Tomb (1917) Jervas Dudley has been confined in a mental asylum. This boy of a wealthy family was, as he tells, a dreamer and a visionary from a young age but unlike many of his peers, was not suited for regular education. Instead of schooling, he spent his time perusing ancient books filled with forgotten secrets.The old books soon lead the boy to an ancient tomb near his home and this tomb became the object of his fascination. The older he got, the more intrigued by the tomb he was. When he finally managed to enter it, he became certain, that the tomb was his, or at least that he had a resting place among the ancient cadavers of the cold, dark catacomb. This idea seeps even deeper into his mind when he finds an empty casket there, where he begins to spend his nights.
The Tomb is quite an interesting tale of mental degradation. Jervas is a man, who has always had a hard time separating reality from his dreams. While it is pointed out, that many things he learns from the tomb, and from his past self, can be explained by the fact that he has spent his life reading old books that also relate to the locations and the people of the area, he is increasingly more confident, that his visions are a reality instead of fantasy.
Mental destabilisation was a common theme in the works of Lovecraft, perhaps because his father died in an asylum and his mother was an unstable personality. In this tale, the mental state of the narrator is clearly aimed to make him an unreliable narrator, which is a common trend among Lovecraft's stories; the madness caused by the unthinkable and how it affects the reliability of the tale told.
Dagon (1917) From the getgo, we know the mental state of the narrator of this tale: he is in duress largely thanks to his morphine addiction. And he is going to tell his story on why he has become such a wreck.A German sea rider managed to capture the boat he was cruising on during the early years of the Great War. Thanks to the lax security, the man managed to escape on a lifeboat, which ended getting stuck on an unknown piece of land, rising from the sea. He spends days exploring the slowly drying desolate landscape, littered with dead fish and their ancient remains.
Finally, from the middle of the land, the nameless narrator finds an obelisk, rising high towards the heavens. It is marked with hieroglyphics, unknown to him or any living man for the matter. In the moonlight, a dark being splashes up from the water, causing him to frantically escape to his lifeboat, from which he is then rescued unconscious.
After he wakes up in a hospital in San Fransico, he asks around of the island he was on but learns no such place exists. But he knows what he saw and especially during the gibbous moon he is certain that things exist in this world far beyond human understanding. Ancient beings, ancient things who abide their time only to conquer again what once was theirs.
Again, Lovecraft nudges questions towards the mental state of the narrator. Not only is he currently a drug-addled wreck, but his tale also took place during the duress of an escape, perhaps prompted by lack of food and water. How much, if anything, that has happened to him after his escape is true and what is fantasy, a feverish dream, is left for the reader to decide.
Dagon is not only of the first fictional stories Lovecraft wrote as an adult, but it is also the first story where he brings up seeds for his Cthulhu mythos. Both of these stories also show an inkling of his common tropes of using unreliable narrators with mental problems to shed some cause to disbelieve their narrations.
I would hesitate to call either story as a horror piece. They do have some elements of horror in them, but as a whole, they are moody ghost stories if even that. The Tomb is more like a character study of an obsessed man with mental problems and Dagon works as a feverish hallucination of a drug addict.
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