“The Secret Cave” (Or, John Lee’s Adventure) by H.P. Lovecraft
“The Secret Cave” is the second surviving work by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. H.P. Lovecraft was only seven when he wrote this, the same age he was when he wrote “The Little Glass Bottle.” Like “Bottle,” this story features boats and treasure, but unlike “Bottle,” “Cave” takes a far darker turn.
The treasure in this story isn’t plain dollars, like in “Bottle,” but a hunk of gold. It’s no eldritch relic, but it’s the first time we hear of a rock featuring prominently in a work.
It’s also our first time reading about a secret passage in the works of H.P. Lovecraft. I believe I once read that Lovecraft was attested to have drawn inspiration from the tunnels of Pembroke College (one of the Seven Sisters women’s colleges, associated with Brown, now closed) but I cannot find the source. If you know what I’m talking about, send a tweet to me and I’ll update this post accordingly. Until then, the source: it came to me in a dream.
I digress. This story’s usage of tunnels is very Scrooge McDuck/Indiana Jones adventure pulpy. I think that is a more likely and realistic explanation of Lovecraft’s fascination with tunnels. Kids like tunnels. Kids like pulpy adventure content. -
I’m not sure if Alice’s fate was meant to seem like a twist in the end, but the mention of the “body” throughout the latter half of the work, at least to me, originally read as being just a random body or skeleton of some other treasure hunter, perhaps. Technically, this is the first death in Lovecraft’s oeuvre. Interestingly enough, Lovecraft was an only child. It’s also interesting that Lovecraft was writing about a protagonist that was older than him. A ten year old boy must seem very grown up to a child of only seven. It does make sense with the plot: perhaps seven is too young for a protagonist to have been left at home alone, babysitting another child, but ten was more common at the time? Maybe it was just a rule in Lovecraft’s own home?
What’s also interesting biographically is that the work is about children being left at home alone, yet, according to Lovecraft’s Wikipedia page, he was ‘never [let] out of [his mother’s] sight’ (H. P. Lovecraft - Wikipedia.) Does that make this a story about the dangers of being left alone? Or about yearning for unsupervised freedom? Perhaps both?
