For whom would you feel more sympathy?
A. A couple of
decadent, psychotic, Necronomicon-reading grave robbers?
B. The 500 year
old spirit of a ghoul who wants his stolen amulet returned to him?
I lean towards ‘B’.
I cannot think of more unattractive human characters than the ones in
Lovecraft’s short story, The Hound,
(1924). The two men, one of them
inexplicably named St. John, do not work, have unlimited time and money, and
are motivated chiefly by boredom and a hunger for morbid thrills. (Later, they are motivated by a fear of being
shredded to bits.) They are
indistinguishable from each other. Fortunately,
St. John winds up “an inert mass of mangled flesh” midway through the tale,
reducing the potential for confusion.
Evidently they live on a planet where there are almost no
other human beings. The tedium of their lives
is relieved only by periodic grave robberies—all over the world—with which they
supply their secret museum with gruesome specimens. Lovecraft gleefully inventories some of the
contents of this museum, ratcheting up the yuck-factor of the story. The author also incessantly repeats lists of Halloween
paraphernalia—full moon, grotesque trees, lots of bats, gravestones, an occasional
vulture, a wolf howling in the distance—to set the tone. This is tiresome after the first repetition.
An excavation of a grave in Rotterdam nets them a jade
amulet, depicting a crouching hound with wings.
What a find! Regrettably, the
model for the jade figurine, and its implacable owner, is much larger and
fiercer and angry. The boys return to England,
but soon begin to experience sights and sounds of being stalked by…well what
could it possibly be?
The narrator's friend is soon predictably mauled and shredded on his
way home from the train station. This is
an oblique reference to the 1911 story by M.R. James, Casting the Runes, which was later made into the classic horror
film, Night of the Demon,
(1957). The monster in the James’ story
and the movie is very similar to Lovecraft’s Hound and Lovecraft was an admirer of the British author.
The narrator returns to Holland in hopes of returning the
amulet and avoiding a fate similar to his friend’s. Comic relief of a sort is provided at one
point when thieves break into the narrator’s hotel room and make off with the
little figure. They are swiftly and
gruesomely dispatched, not having abided the 7.5th Commandment,
which is “Thou shalt not steal what is already stolen.” At the end of the story the narrator awaits a
terrible end, having verified that the contents of the grave in Rotterdam and the
monster now stalking him are one and the same.
This is not one
of Lovecraft’s better stories. It reads
as if portions of it were still a rough draft, lacking important detail or
adequate transitions between scenes. Neither
the characters nor their chief occupation are believable. Their fate is predictable very early in the
story, as is the appearance of the monster.
All of Lovecraft’s stories appear to form an organic
whole, with connections and echoes of other stories always present. For example, the character of St. John dominates
and leads the narrator in The Hound,
just as Harley Warren does with the narrator in The Statement of Randolph Carter.
There are references to the Necronomicon,
Abdul Alhazred, and the plateau of Leng.
The Hound also shares
similarities with Lovecraft’s other stories that feature ghouls, though this
monster has more canine features.
This story has a graphic treatment in volume 2 of The Lovecraft Anthology, published by
SelfMadeHero. All of the grizzly details
are included.
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