YMMV / The Hound (1924)

• Common Knowledge:
  • Some fans as well as the two comic adaptations treat the hound as the undead Dutchman's awakened form rather than a temporary transformation and depict it as the state in which the narrator digs up the Dutchman the second time. This isn't quite supported by the text, as the narrator mentions no changes to such an extent between the skeleton as it was dug up the first time and as it was the second time. The skeleton the second time is covered in the remains of its recent victims, its eye sockets now glow, which the hound's eyes aren't ever suggested to do, and while fangs are described, these aren't conclusively different from the "long, firm teeth" the skeleton had before and which did not put to question that the skeleton belonged to a human. It furthermore takes hearing the skeleton bay for the protagonist to truly comprehend that the hound and the Dutchman are the same, which would be odd if the skeleton was sphinx-like.
  • "The Hound" uses the term "ghoul" to refer to the protagonists and the Dutchman for a total of four times. For this reason and the canine motif, "The Hound" is at times argued to be the first story of Lovecraft to feature ghouls. However, the term "ghoul" is three times used in the meaning of "graverobber" or "corpse-snatcher" and while the fourth instance on its own is ambiguous, following on the other three it isn't logical to mean something else. The term is never used for the Dutchman in his undead state. Furthermore, while there is a canine motif, there's a bat motif of equal significance too that needs addressing. A third pro-ghoul argument concerns the origin of the amulet with "the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng," but when Lovecraft put definite supernatural ghouls and Leng in one story in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath about five years later, ghouls had nothing to do with Leng, so the "corpse-eating cult" isn't likely to be about them.
• Narm: One of the signature lines of the short story is "We only realised, with the blackest of apprehensions, that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the Dutch language." This line marks the conclusion of two paragraphs building up the supernatural phenomena haunting the protagonists in their home and confirms that what's after them is the long-dead Dutchman whose amulet they've stolen. But with or without that context, many readers find the line, with its vaguely xenophobic italics, over-the-top and preposterously dramatic. It's a cornerstone topic in the larger discussion whether "The Hound" is to be read earnestly or as a parody.