THE READING RHEUM: "THE HOUND" (1922/1924)

 

"The Hound" takes double honors as the first story to mention that the lore-filled compendium The Necronomicon, and as the first story HPL placed with the premiere horror-magazine of the 1930s, WEIRD TALES. But for all that, it's a fairly ordinary story of supernatural vengeance.

"Hound" follows the template of "Randolph Carter" but improves somewhat on the motivations of the transgressors. In "Carter," the unnamed narrator and his named accomplice simply want to research forbidden lore, which leads to the accomplice's demise and the narrator's implication in that death. In "Hound," the unnamed narrator and his accomplice, one 'St. John," are consumed with a morbid love of transgressing upon gravesites, liberating "trophies" for their private domicile. The two are so in love with their aestheticized form of necrophilia-- compared to the perversions of the 19th century Decadent writers-- that their house is redolent of a fragrance that smells like rotting corpses. Naturally HPL does not allude to any sexual thrills that the transgressors gain from violating the resting places of the dead, but modern readers won't be able to read their crimes as having any other possible interpretation.

The partners in crime make the mistake of plundering the grave of an unnamed "ghoul" buried in Holland, and they rip off a talisman with the image of a hound on it. As they leave they hear the baying of a distant hound. Some spectre follows them to England and mangles St. John to death, and the narrator becomes terrified enough to consider returning the talisman to its place of origin. But some entity, later revealed to be the spectre, steals the amulet. The narrator still goes back to Holland and once more unearths the coffin of the famous ghoul, only to find that the talisman is back in the hands of the corpse. The narrator hears the hound approach, takes time to write the story as a suicide note, and presumably succeeds at killing himself before the creature overtakes him.

The narrative drive is crippled by the silly game of "who's got the amulet," and the idea that the entity associated with the object wants to be back in the hands of the ghoul makes no sense. Maybe if the ghoul had created the amulet, the story would have hewed closer to the simple trope of a dead man wanting to "take it with him." HPL was evidently trying to meld that more traditional "unquiet dead" story with his evolving ideas on an imponderable demonology with no ties to Earth-religion. Fortunately HPL managed to find much better ways to accomplish the same ends in future narratives.