Showing results for "In the Vault" in Classics

Zothique is Earth's last continent in the very distant future when the sun has grown dim, the work has grown old and the remorseless seas have overwhelmed all other continents. The sciences have been forgotten as the shadowy arts of sorcery and magic have been reborn. The result: a dark world of older mystery where luxurious kings and wandering heroes venture across dim landscapes, pitting their strength and wisdom against powerful wizards, necromancers and alien gods all under a dying sun.

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, and his escape by enlarging a transom reached by the piling up of the coffins'.

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.