The Hound
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The Hound" is a short story written by H.P. Lovecraft in September 1922 and published in the February 1924 issue of Weird Tales. It contains the first mention of Lovecraft's fictional text the Necronomicon.
Contents |
[edit] Inspiration
On September 16, 1922, Lovecraft toured the Flatbush Reformed Church in Brooklyn with his friend Rheinhart Kleiner, writing about the visit in a letter:
- Around the old pile is a hoary churchyard, with internments dating from around 1730 to the middle of the nineteenth century.... From one of the crumbling gravestones--dated 1747--I chipped a small piece to carry away. It lies before me as I write--and ought to suggest some sort of horror-story. I must place it beneath my pillow as I sleep... who can say what thing might not come out of the centuried earth to exact vengeance for his desecrated tomb? And should it come, who can say what it might not resemble?[1]
Lovecraft wrote "The Hound" shortly afterwards, using as the name of one of the main characters his nickname for his companion Kleinhart, "St. John".[2] The grave that is fatefully robbed in the story is in a "terrible Holland churchyard"--perhaps a reference to Flatbush church being part of the Dutch Reformed Church.
Critic Steven J. Mariconda suggests that the story is a tribute to the Decadent literary movement in general and in particular Joris-Karl Huysmans' A rebours, an 1884 novel that Lovecraft greatly admired. (Huysmans is mentioned by name in the story, along with Baudelaire.) Like "The Hound"'s protagonists, victims of a "devastating ennui", the main character of A rebours suffers from an "overpowering tedium" that leads him to "imagine and then indulge in unnatural love-affairs and perverse pleasures."[3]
Mariconda also points to the heavy debt the story owes to Edgar Allan Poe, an influence acknowledged by several borrowed phrases:
- The "oblong box" exumed, the mysterious "knock on my chamber door", and the "red death" brought by the Hound all echo Poe's phraseology.[4]
[edit] Reaction
Though Lovecraft chose "The Hound" as one of the five stories he initially submitted to Weird Tales, his main professional outlet, he later dismissed it as "a dead dog"[5] and "a piece of junk"[6]
Some critics have shared Lovecraft's deprecation; Lin Carter called it "a minor little tale" that is "slavishly Poe-esque in style".[7] But the story has its defenders; Steven J. Mariconda says it is "written in a zestful, almost baroque style which is very entertaining",[8] while Peter Cannon, saying that it must have been written "with tongue at least partly in cheek", credits it with a certain "naive charm".[9]
The plot of the Poppy Z. Brite short story "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood" bears a strong resemblance to this Lovecraft story, albeit transplanted to a modern Southern Gothic Louisiana setting.
[edit] Synopsis
The story focuses around the narrarator and his friend St. John, who have an interest in robbing graves. One night, in a Holland graveyard they happen upon a strange and elaborately made coffin containing a corpse wearing a jade amulet. They steal it and flee to their homes once more, noting the continuous sound of a hound's baying in the distance. Even as they return home, strange sounds can be heard in their house, including the distant sound of the dog. This culminates into his friend being violently attacked and killed by the hound, which he claims the amulet had brought unto him. He also finds the amulet to be missing.
Growing mad, he returns to the churchyard and excavates the coffin out of the earth once more, only to find the skeleton within replaced with a horrific creature that made the same howling that had plagued him since he left, now in possession of the amulet. The narrator flees the graveyard and commits suicide.
[edit] Cthulhu Mythos
"The Hound" contains several references to the body of lore known as the Cthulhu Mythos that Lovecraft shared with other horror writers. Most notably, it marks the first appearance of one of Lovecraft's most famous literary creations--the forbidden book known as the Necronomicon. Lovecraft had mentioned its author a year earlier, in "The Nameless City", but here for the first time named the book. Referring to an amulet found on a grave-robbing expedition, the narrator relates:
- Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead.
The reference to "Leng" is one of the first mentions of Lovecraft's imaginary plateau, having only appeared before in 1920s "Celephais". Here placed in Central Asia, Leng is also associated in Lovecraft's writings with Antarctica and his imaginary Dreamlands.
Lovecraftian scholar Will Murray, pointing to the "semi-canine face" on the amulet as well as the "corpse-eating cult" of Leng, suggests that the titular creature of "The Hound" "probably represents an early form of the ghoul as Lovecraft would develop it."[10]
[edit] References
- Lovecraft, Howard P. [1920] (1999). "The Hound", in S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon (eds.): More Annotated Lovecraft, 1st, New York City, NY: Dell. ISBN 0-440-50875-4. With explanatory footnotes.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Lovecraft, Selected Letters, Vol. I p. 98; quoted in Steven J. Mariconda, "'The Hound'--a Dead Dog?" in The Horror of It All, Robert M. Price, ed., p. 49.
- ^ Mariconda, p. 49.
- ^ Mariconda, p. 50.
- ^ Mariconda, p. 51.
- ^ Mariconda, p. 53.
- ^ H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Vol. 3, p. 192; cited in Peter Cannon, "Introduction", More Annotated Lovecraft, p. 4.
- ^ Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, p. 24.
- ^ Mariconda, p. 53.
- ^ Cannon, p. 4.
- ^ Will Murray, "Lovecraft's Ghouls", in The Horror of It All, Robert M. Price, ed., p. 41.
