Showing results for "The Hound" in Anthologies & Short Stories

The story opens with the unnamed narrator preparing to commit suicide. Lamenting his fate, he reflects upon the events which led him to this moment. The narrator and his friend, St. John, are a pair of loners who both have a deranged interest in robbing graves. They constantly defile crypts and often keep souvenirs of their nocturnal expeditions. Since they reside in the same house, they have the opportunity to set up a sort of morbid museum in their basement. Using the objects collected from the various graves they have robbed, the two men organize a private exhibition.

H. P. Lovecraft's "The Hound" is the tale of two dark-minded men whose hobby is robbing crypts and graves, collecting "souvenirs" such as headstones and skulls from the decayed corpses for private exhibition in the house they share. Stealing a cursed jade amulet from the skeletal remains of a Dutchman who was himself a legendary graverobbing ghoul, they find themselves pursued back to their 'museum' by an unseen hound, whose distant baying comes from the distance. At this point the story takes ever darker directions....

This particularly chilling short story was inspired by a trip that Lovecraft made with Rheinhart Kleiner to the 18th-century Dutch Reformed Church on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn - and to its adjacent graveyard, full of grave markers dating from the mid-1700s. While there, Lovecraft pocketed a piece of one of the grave markers; and it set him to thinking about the possibilities of a story plot in which a vengeful tomb-denizen, resenting a similar act of souvenir-taking, claws its way out of the grave to track down the desecrator.