Extinguishing all lights, we proceeded to the door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and heard as if receding far away a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and articulate chatter. Whether we were mad, dreaming, or in our senses, we did not try to determine. We only realised, with the blackest of apprehensions, that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the Dutch language.
—The narrator
"The Hound" is a Short Story that H. P. Lovecraft wrote in October of 1922. It debuted in the February 1924 issue of Weird Tales and was reprinted in its September 1929 issue before posthumously being collected in Beyond the Wall of Sleep in 1943. "The Hound" is one of Lovecraft's more Gothic works with a generous helping of Decadence and despite this tonal difference from Lovecraft's characteristic output, it is part of the Cthulhu Mythos. It's been argued that the story is to be read as a Stealth Parody like "Herbert West–Reanimator", while others compare "The Hound" to the likes of "The Outsider (1926)" as an honest stylistic experiment.
The narrator and St. John are Englishmen living together in an ancient manor-house on the moors. In their struggle against boredom, they've turned to depravity as promoted by the Decadent Movement and consequently taken to collecting macabre objects the bulk of which they steal from graves. The two learn of a Dutch graverobber who five centuries ago was mangled to death by some beast and is now buried in a churchyard nearby Rotterdam along with a curious amulet he himself had stolen from a sepulchre. Desiring the heritage of a preceding peer, the protagonists travel to Holland to dig it up. The Dutchman's skeleton is indeed mangled but otherwise remarkably intact and the amulet turns out to be a jade figurine of a winged canine. Once back home, the protagonists find their manor beset by all manner of supernatural phenomena, such as the omnipresent baying of a hound and an infestation of bats. The hauntings gradually grow worse until St. John is mauled to death one night walking home. The narrator buries him privately and soon after destroys their collection but for the amulet, which he takes with him to London to find safety among people. When that doesn't work, he returns to Holland to rebury the amulet in the Dutchman's grave. It gets stolen on the way and with nothing to offer but apologies, the narrator continues with his plan to dig up the Dutchman. Inside the coffin, however, the skeleton is no longer alone, as many bats are sleeping inside, nor is the skeleton still believably dead. It's covered in blood, its eyes glow, and it bays. It also has the amulet back. The narrator runs, but aware now that mercy is not on the table, he resolves to off himself to avoid worse.
As suggested by a letter to Lillian D. Clark dated September 29, 1922, the real-life inspiration to "The Hound" is a visit Lovecraft paid to the Flatbush Reformed Protestant Dutch Church in Brooklyn in the company of his friend Rheinhart Kleiner on September 16, 1922. Lovecraft mentions that he took a piece of a gravestone home with him and that he intends to let it inspire him into writing a new story. The character of St. John, likewise, is named after Randolph St. John, a pseudonym of Rheinhart Kleiner.
On the literary end, "The Hound" is thought to be thematically inspired by A Rebours by Joris Karl Huysmans. Both stories are about men isolating themselves from society and doing everything that comes to mind as a way to stave off boredom. Huysmans himself is furthermore referenced in the text. For the eponymous hound, Lovecraft may have taken from Dracula and The Horla. Aside from the implication that the Dutchman became a member of the undead as a result of being attacked by one, the two animals associated with him are the bat and the hound, which are Dracula's two confirmed animal transformations. On The Horla's end, it and "The Hound" end similarly insofar that their protagonists burn their belongings and contemplate suicide when nothing works against the entities stalking them.
"The Hound" is the first story to feature the Necronomicon though the second to reference Abdul Alhazred and his writings, which first occurred in "The Nameless City". It is also the second story, coming after "Celephaïs", to make mention of Leng. In regards to Lovecraft's suspicion towards everything outside of his own social sphere, "The Hound" is the first of three stories in which the Dutch are the monstrous other, preceding "The Lurking Fear" and "The Horror at Red Hook".
"The Hound" was adapted into comic form for Skull #4 on May 1972 and again as part of H.P. Lovecraft's The Hound and Other Stories by Gou Tanabe in 2014. The short story furthermore is the inspiration behind "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood" by Billy Martin in 1990, "Some Distant Baying Sound" by W.H. Pugmire in 2009, "Houndwife" by Caitlín R. Kiernan in 2010, and "The Hound" once more by W.H. Pugmire in 2014.
"The Hound" provides examples of the following tropes:
- Apocalyptic Log: The story is presented as the final scribblings of a man who is being stalked by a supernatural entity. As he mentally readies himself to commit suicide before the creature gets to him, he jots down a recapitulation as to how it came to this.
- Barrage of Bats: The narrator and St. John encounter legions of colossal bats in the Holland churchyard, but think little of them until they leave with an amulet stolen from a grave. In the faint moonlight, they perceive a flock of bats descending to the grave. Back home in England, they find their manor-house beset by an unprecedented and increasing amount of great bats and the occasional glimpse of a large black shape that may or may not be a number of bats acting as one around another entity. The narrator eventually returns to the Holland churchyard in a bid for mercy from the amulet's previous owner and spots an abnormal quantity of bats hovering suspiciously around the gravesite. Any doubts that the bats are in league with the amulet's owner are squashed when the narrator reopens the grave, this time finding it filled with a "retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats" surrounding the corpse.
- Blood Is the New Black: After his amulet get stolen from him, the Dutchman as the hound hunts down the thieves and ends them by tearing into them like a beast. He returns to his grave afterwards, "covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair." It is like this that the last remaining thief digs him up, which makes for a sight quite different from the clean skeleton the thief saw him as before.
- Bookcase Passage: The protagonists are implied to have the single entrance to their underground macabre museum hidden behind a bookcase. The passage, in any case, is described as "the secret library staircase."
- Campbell Country: About half of the story takes place in the protagonists' ancient manor-house on the moors in England. They live in isolation and the lack of social control suits their macabre habits expressed in the form of a museum filled with grave goods and body parts personally stolen. What they learn when they steal a supernaturally imbued grave good is that isolation also means that there is no one to stand by them when they are beset by a vengeful entity. St. John gets mauled to death one night when walking home from the distant railway station and the narrator moves to London thereafter, destroying the museum before he goes.
- Creepy Souvenir: The protagonists are fervent graverobbers, corpse-snatchers, and collectors of all kinds of macabre objects. They've got a small museum's worth of stuff gotten from digging up coffins and breaking into tombs internationally, among which various human body parts both preserved and some ways into decomposition.
- Dark Secret: The well-kept secret of the narrator and St. John is their appetite for graverobbing and corpse-snatching. They've done it many times already, enough to set up a small museum full of grotesqueries some of which the narrator refuses to describe. After St. John is murdered, the narrator leaves their shared home and destroys the museum to prevent discovery. Even when he's resolved to kill himself and such discovery of the collection would no longer affect him, he expresses satisfaction that he had it destroyed beforehand.
- Desecrating the Dead: A good portion of the protagonists' repulsive collection of objects they themselves have taken from graves are human body parts. There are "skulls of all shapes, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution" as well as "the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and the fresh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children." Also present are taxidermied "comely, life-like bodies", but it's ambiguous if these bodies are of humans or animals and, in that same boat, how the protagonists acquired them. Among the evident purchases in the collection are antique mummies and a portfolio that is bound in tanned human skin. There is likely more, because the narrator hints at stuff even worse that he refuses to elaborate on.
- Destroy the Evidence: After the murder of St. John, the narrator is afraid to continue to live in their ancient manor-house on the moor by himself and moves to London. He burns down and buries the grave goods and body parts he and his companion had stolen over the years as well as any other evidence of the sinister museum they maintained before he goes.
- Driven to Suicide: The story is one long suicide note, starting with the narrator's intent to blow his brains out to avoid being killed by the Dutchman and ending with the assertion that he'll pull the trigger soon for he hears his hunter approaching.
- Due to the Dead: Two corpses are treated to final rites.
- Five hundred years ago, the Dutch graverobber was mauled to death in the graveyard. The locals, who may or may not have known about his illicit activities and may or may not have known him to begin with, buried him in a coffin in that same graveyard along with jade amulet found on his remains.
- The narrator buries St. John after he was mauled to death in one of the manor's neglected gardens come midnight. As part of the final rites he bestows on his companion, he mumbles "over his body one of the devilish rituals he had loved in life."
- Emergency Weapon: A vulture lands next to the narrator when he's digging up the Dutchman a second time. Despite the creature minding its own business, the narrator feels compelled to raise his shovel and kill the bird.
- Family Extermination: While back in Holland to return the amulet to the undead Dutchman, the narrator is robbed of the precious cargo. That night, the hound attacks the thief's or thieves' household, tearing to shreds the entire family residing there.
- Full Moon Silhouette: Thrice do disturbing entities come into the protagonists' sight against the backdrop of the moon. First there are the many huge bats in the Dutch graveyard the protagonists perceive best when they fly in front of the moon. Thereafter, back in their home in England, an early haunting they experience is the sight of a "large, opaque body" that darkens an otherwise moonlight-bathed window. This is concluded some months later by the death of St. John, at whose side the narrator perceives a "vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the rising moon."
- Genuine Human Hide: The protagonists own "a locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin." It contains horrific drawings rumoured to originate from Goya's hand.
- Grave Robbing: The narrator and St. John are two peas in a pod desperate to escape boredom. To this end, they've started robbing final resting places; sometimes of grave goods, sometimes of body parts. Their collection contains samples in all states of preservation and decay and from all walks of life. They also own a number of ancient mummies, which likely they've purchased from other graverobbers rather than extracted themselves.
- Haunted House: The protagonists' home is an ancient manor-house standing isolated on the moors of England. It becomes haunted when the protagonists steal a mystical amulet from the grave of a Dutchman whom death hasn't put to rest. There are curious sounds, an infestation of bats, indeterminate shadows, disconcerting footprints, and more. After St. John is killed, the narrator abandons the manor and as the entity follows him for both the amulet and revenge, the building ceases to be haunted.
- Hell Hound: The undead Dutchman, when not resting in his grave as a human skeleton, is implied to take the form of a "winged hound, or sphinx with a semi-canine face." This is the form of the amulet the Dutchman has with him in his coffin, but the hound itself is only ever observed as a nondescript shadow. The entity's presence is first established when the protagonists enter the Holland churchyard and hear the faint baying of a hound. Once they steal the Dutchman's amulet, the baying sticks with them, indicating that the hound is after them for the theft. Another sound associated with the entity is the whirring of wings like those of a bat, but this is only heard when the hound is nearby while the baying is heard at many distances. The hound, after months of haunting, tears St. John to shreds one night and about a week later slaughters an entire family when they in turn steal the amulet from the narrator. The only reason the narrator may escape this fate is because he resolves to commit suicide before the hound gets him.
- Hell Is That Noise: The hound's presence is first established when the protagonists enter the Holland churchyard and hear the faint baying of a hound. This baying follows them on the ship back to England and to their manor-house on the moors, being rarely traceable as coming from a specific direction. The terror brought on by the baying swells with its reoccurrences and gets worsened by the additional but less frequent sound of moving wings. In the end, when St. John is dead and the narrator digs up the Dutchman in a bid for mercy, he is left stunned when he finds the corpse in an evident state of undeadness and covered in organic material that indicates he's killed someone not too long ago. Freeze turns to flight only when the Dutchman greets him by baying.
- How We Got Here: The opening paragraph announces that the narrator is about to commit suicide to avoid perishing at the claws and teeth of an undead monstrosity. What follows thereafter is a recapitulation of why said undead has it out for him until the final paragraph closes with the affirmation that the narrator will blow his brains out immediately after putting down the pen.
- In the Dreaming Stage of Grief: One of the first things the narrator pens down in his suicide note is that he'd wish dearly that he could believe that all that happened and the lingering threat was but a dream or madness.
- It Amused Me: Motivated by boredom, the narrator and St. John dive deep into a decadent life style focused entirely on robbing graves, sometimes of objects and sometimes of body parts, and keeping a museum of their loot. As with kleptomania, they know it isn't right, but that's what makes it addicting. When their activities lead to them getting hunted by a supernatural entity, only the narrator survives long enough to express "shame and timidity" for how far they they went in their pursuits.
- It's Probably Nothing: When first the protagonists hear the same baying on the ship back to England as they did in the Dutch graveyard, they blame it on the autumn wind.
- Laughing Mad: As the narrator flees the Holland churchyard to escape the undead Dutchman, his screams morph into peals of hysterical laughter.
- MacGuffin: The Dutchman's amulet is the driving force that brings the protagonists and the undead in contact. The narrator and St. John steal it from the Dutchman's grave aware that it is something special but unaware of what makes it special. The narrative does not fill in the gaps either. It's implied that the amulet played a role in the Dutchman becoming undead, but what it did in addition to him getting mauled by another undead is unclear. The Dutchman, in any case, doesn't need the amulet to sustain himself or his powers, because he's perfectly capable of coming for any thief regardless if that thief has the amulet in their direct possession or has already lost it.
- Mad Artist: The narrator and St. John are educated in various forms of art. They create statues and paintings, play a variety of musical instruments, craft scents, and may practice taxidermy. All of these arts co-exist with their collection of morbid artifacts and body parts, being either used to add to it or practiced in the midst of their secret museum. Furthermore, the two consider their graverobbing outings expressions of art that elevate them above the vulgarity of the average graverobber. They operate "only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and moonlight" and anything off like an "inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or a clumsy manipulation of the damp sod" ruins the performance needed for aesthetic satisfaction.
- Madness Shared by Two: As the hauntings in their home grow worse, the narrator and St. John believe that they're jointly going mad as a consequence of their morbid fascinations. When the hound kills St. John, that belief crumbles.
- Meaningful Echo: When the narrator and St. John first enter the Holland churchyard, they are in high spirits about the treasure waiting for them and elated about the aesthetic circumstances of the night they've picked to go graverobbing. They delight in "the pale autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the livid sky; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a distant corner; the odours of mould, vegetation, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the night-wind from over far swamps and seas; and worst of all, the faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound which we could neither see nor definitely place." Nearly three months later, the undead owner of the treasure has killed St. John and the narrator has returned to the Dutch churchyard to appease him in low hopes of escaping the same fate. Now alone, for the narrator there is only trepidation in the "unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows, and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the unfriendly sky, and the night-wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and frigid seas. The baying was very faint now, and it ceased altogether as I approached the ancient grave I had once violated, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats which had been hovering curiously around it."
- Misplaced Wildlife: As the narrator is digging for the Dutchman a second time, he is joined by a vulture that starts pecking the gravesite soil. Vultures do exist in Europe, but typically in the Mediterranean countries and only a few species accept habitats as far north as Swiss. The vulture population closest to the Netherlands are the bearded vultures in the Bavarian Alps, but that population was extinct during the 20th Century. Perhaps the vulture is there solely for supernatural reasons, but even if that's the case, the English narrator is not at all surprised about seeing one, which he should be.
- Must Be Invited: One night, the narrator hears a knock at his chamber door. Assuming it is St. John, because that's the only other person in the house, he tells the knocker to enter, but no one does. Instead, the invitation is answered by shrill laughter. Later, the protagonists are in their underground museum when they hear scratching at the door. They open it only to feel a strong wind gushing into the room. Although no conclusions are attached to these events, the entity on their trail appears to be working towards more and more access into the manor by being let in.
- Must Make Amends: After the murder of St. John, the narrator returns to Holland to rebury the mysterious jade amulet with the corpse they stole it from. The narrator doubts it will end the supernatural creature's desire for vengeance, but there's nothing else he can try. His assumption turns out to be correct: returning the amulet does not grant mercy.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Boredom leads the narrator and St. John to grave-robbing, sometimes taking objects and sometimes taking body parts, all of which they keep in a personal museum. As with kleptomania, they know it isn't right, but that only makes it harder to stop. When their activities lead to them getting hunted by a supernatural entity, St. John gets offed quickly while the narrator in his suicide note expresses "shame and timidity" that they ever let themselves fall to this "hideous extremity of human outrage".
- Mystical Jade: The amulet that belonged to a cult operating in or from Leng, that was acquired through grave-theft by the Dutchman, and that was in turn stolen from the Dutchman's grave by the protagonists is carved from a piece of green jade. Its design betrays it's an ancient ornament of Oriental origin, likely from Central Asia. The carving resembles what is either a winged hound or a canine sphinx and includes an unidentified inscription as well as a skull as what may be a maker's seal. It is left ambiguous if the amulet is magical or merely symbolical.
- Nightmare Fetishist: The narrator and St. John spend their days collecting whatever ghastly things they can find. The objects range from mystical artifacts to personal assets to body parts mostly if not solely of human origin. Said body parts range from fresh or mummified to rotting to clean bones. The whole collection is arranged into a secret underground museum, which doubles as a place to practice all manner of art, play around with spells and curses they read about in books, experiment with morbid and esoteric scents, and perform unconventional religious rites. Their whole motivation for setting this all up is to avoid boredom and nothing else works.
- No Name Given: The narrator remains unnamed.
- One to Million to One: There is something unexplained going on between the flocks of bats that accompany the undead entity known as the hound, who in his grave is but a human skeleton. Whenever the hound is observed, its form is amorphous, the closest encounter leaving it described as a "vague black cloudy thing". It flies most of the time, but it does also leave weird footprints. In particular because of two scenes, namely when a flock of bats descend upon the Dutchman's grave after his amulet gets stolen and when many bats are discovered sleeping inside his coffin, the impression is that the bats form the flesh of the hound around the skeleton of the Dutchman.
- Our Sphinxes Are Different: The creature depicted by the amulet is described by the narrator as a "crouching winged hound, or sphinx with a semi-canine face." As per the Necronomicon, it is the symbol of the corpse-eating cult of Leng in Central Asia. It is likely the form of the hound whose baying haunts the protagonists from the moment they set foot in the Dutch graveyard, but the creature is never directly observed to confirm.
- Platonic Life-Partners: The narrator and St. John live together in an ancient manor on the moors without any servants and with as good as never a visitor. They have each other and that is all they need, but despite their many shared interests and activities they aren't romantically involved and they also explicitly sleep in different rooms.
- Riddle for the Ages: As the narrator is digging for the Dutchman a second time, he is joined by a vulture that starts frantically pecking the gravesite soil. The narrator kills it with a shovel strike. The oddity of a vulture flying around in the Netherlands aside, this entire encounter takes place in only one sentence and despite attention-grabbers like "queer interruption" and "frantically", there's nothing to connect it to anything else in the story. The vulture's behavior resembles that of the bats just after the protagonists had stolen the Dutchman's amulet, but while a connection between the Dutchman and the bats is established, there's nothing between him and vultures. Just as well, the vulture may have been an enemy of the Dutchman in his own right. The narrator doesn't motivate why he felt the need to kill the vulture either.
- Robbing the Dead: The narrator and St. John are two prolific graverobbers and corpse-snatchers whose ill-gotten gains are plentiful enough to fill up a small and highly secret museum. The collection consists of ancient headstones and a variety of tomb-loot so bad that the narrator refuses to elaborate despite being fine with describing all manner of body parts they've got on display too. The last item added to the collection is the amulet they'd taken from the 500-year old grave of a Dutchman who also looted graves in his time. As an undead, the Dutchman comes after them, which necessitates the narrator to burn and bury the museum's contents and to return the amulet.
- Say Your Prayers: Preparing to commit suicide to avoid a more ghastly death, the narrator notes down his remaining hope on divine mercy: "May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrous a fate!"
- Shout-Out:
- The scholarly but otherwise undefined narrator is one of many stand-ins for Lovecraft himself. His companion, St. John, is named after Randolph St. John, the pseudonym of Rheinhart Kleiner, who was Lovecraft's friend and one of his first literary companions.
- The protagonists are enthusiastic followers of the Decadent Movement and among others read the works of Charles Baudelaire and Joris Karl Huysmans.
- The protagonists own several drawings that might have been made by Francisco de Goya.
- Sinister Scraping Sound: On September 28th, the narrator and St. John are in their illicit museum when they perceive a "low, cautious scratching" at the single door in or out. They are doubly afraid, for whatever causes the sound could be the entity haunting them but it could also be officers of the law that somehow have gotten wind of the museum. Upon opening the door, the cause of the scratching rules out the latter.
- Taxidermy Terror: One category of objects the protagonists have on display in their macabre museum is taxidermy. Many "comely, life-like bodies" are to be found there "perfectly stuffed and cured by the taxidermist's art". It is ambiguous if the taxidermied bodies are those of humans or those of animals.
- Tomes of Eldritch Lore: The narrator and St. John possess a copy of the Necronomicon, in which they find information about the mysterious jade amulet they acquired. It isn't mentioned whether the tome is among the artifacts the narrator burned or those he buried or if perhaps it was left undamaged in the manor-house.
- The Undead: The Dutchman as the eponymous hound plays fast and loose with pseudo-folkloric literary conventions without coming to any answers what he is or how his postmortem powers work. What is clear is that the Dutchman five hundred years ago was a graverobber who got "torn and mangled by the claws and teeth of some unspeakable beast" while at work. This attack in conjunction with a mystical jade amulet he'd taken from a "mighty sepulchre" turned him into another unspeakable beast. The amulet represents "a crouching winged hound, or sphinx with a semi-canine face" and is identified as "the soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng". The Dutchman was buried with the amulet and seems to have since laid aware but inactive, his flesh rotting away while his mangled skeleton and teeth remained pristine. It is in this state that the protagonists steal the amulet from him, leading him to hunt them down. When next his coffin is dug up and opened, he's already killed several people involved in the theft of the amulet and no longer is a supine clean human skeleton, but a human skeleton crouching and covered in scraps of flesh, hair, and blood. His eye sockets glow and his baying betrays him to be the enigmatic hound that has stalked the protagonists all this time. Because of the human form of the skeleton, the form of the hound is hinted to be the result of shapeshifting and this may be made possible by the many huge bats associated with him, although the hound itself is never directly observed by the narrator to confirm its existence and appearance. The closest are a series of footprints the protagonists discover that are "utterly impossible to describe."
- Unseen Evil: The undead Dutchman has two forms: that of human skeleton with somewhat prominent teeth and that what is implied to be a bat-winged hound. The skeleton form is seen twice when his coffin gets dug up; it isn't clear it's anything but an ordinary skeleton the first time but it's clearly animate the second time. The form of the hound, however, is never observed. The Dutchman uses this form to go out and terrorize those who've stolen his amulet. All they manage to glimpse is a "large, opaque body", a "vague black cloudy thing", a "wide nebulous shadow", and a "black shape", and the protagonists also find footprints near their manor that are "utterly impossible to describe". The only reasons to believe that the Dutchman takes the form of a bat-winged hound is because that's the shape of his amulet and because his presence is made clear by ominous baying and the whirring of wings.
- Viral Transformation: Five hundred years ago, the Dutchman was a graverobber who was found dead in the churchyard, having been "torn and mangled by the claws and teeth of some unspeakable beast." It is all but confirmed that this is how he himself became a bestial undead creature with the same modus operandi for dealing with his own prey, although he doesn't seem interested in or capable of turning anyone himself. The amulet in his possession that likely depicts his form as the hound may also have played a role in his transformation into the undead, but how is unclear.
- Year X: Some days into getting haunted by the Dutchman, the narrator gives the date as "the night of September 24, 19––".
