THE DEEP ONES: "The Hound" by H.P. Lovecraft

"The Hound" by H.P. Lovecraft

Discussion begins October 9th.

First published in the February 1924 issue of Weird Tales.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/h.aspx
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lovecraft/hp/hound/
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600031h.html#42

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41886

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
Dagon and Other Macabre Tales
Devils & Demons
100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories

MISCELLANY

http://cthulhuwho1.com/2010/12/27/h-p-lovecrafts-the-hound-1922-read-by-william-...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hound
http://vimeo.com/73994594
http://tinyurl.com/q5kffgn
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2006/oct/19/the-heroic-nerd/?pagination...

I'll be rereading this out my trusty copy of H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction.

ETA: "rereading" not "reading"

>1 semdetenebre:

Really enjoyed the New York Review of Books piece you linked to at the bottom - thanks for posting. :)

I think I might listen to a recording of this one. I've got a reading by William Roberts on the Naxos Audiobook The Call of Cthulhu and other stories, or there's this one by Roddy McDowell:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHgfENTZPpU

Dagon and Other Macabre Tales for me.

I find that I always enjoy reading "The Hound". Not as great Lovecraft, but as a fun haunted house ride of a horror tale. The description of the "tomb loot" found in the "repellent chamber" of the "blasphemous" library is gruesomely detailed in an entertaining manner:

Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, life-like bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the taxidermist’s art, and with headstones snatched from the oldest churchyards of the world. Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and the fresh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. Statues and paintings there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St. John and myself. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnamable drawings which it was rumoured Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, and wood-wind, on which St. John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness; whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. It is of this loot in particular that I must not speak—thank God I had the courage to destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself.

Note that those "nauseous musical instruments" have a cacodemoniacal effect! Wikipedia tells us of the origins of the word "cacodemon":

A cacodemon (or cacodaemon) is an evil spirit or (in the modern sense of the word) a demon. The opposite of a cacodemon is an agathodaemon or eudaemon, a good spirit or angel. The word cacodemon comes through Latin from the Ancient Greek κακοδαίμων (kakodaimōn) meaning an evil spirit, whereas daimon would be a neutral spirit in Greek and Tychodaimon would be a good spirit. In psychology, cacodemonia (or cacodemomania) is a form of insanity in which the patient believes that they are possessed by an evil spirit. The first known occurrence of the word cacodemon dates to 1398. In Shakespeare's Richard III Act 1 Scene 3, Queen Margaret calls Richard a "cacodemon" for his foul deeds and manipulations.

I think any other author might have simply let it go at "demoniacal" (well except for maybe CAS), but HPL would of course have the correct - if somewhat esoteric - term.

Because I can't resist belabouring a single word more than KentonSem has already done, note that Lovecraft uses, I think invariably, "daemoniac" rather than the more common "demonic". Presumably he prefered it because it's more Classically correct, reflecting Greek daimoniakos, while the -ic form is of Latin origin (and thus "inauthentic" because the root is Greek).

(While at it, daimon is not necessarily neutral in Greek. In Classical usage it's any spirit, benevolent, malevolent, or indifferent, and in later Christian usage it takes on more or less the same connotations of evil as its English derivative - already so in the New Testament.)

The writing of "The Hound" in 1922 is great fodder for Gavin Callaghan's thesis that HPL's horror fiction had a satirical aim directed against cultural and aesthetic decadents. This story, introducing the Necronomicon amidst the trappings of gothic horror, on a foundation of decadent excess, marks a turning-point towards what became the distinctively Lovecraftian "mythos."

Note that the Necronomicon is here very much a grimoire--like it is in CAS's "Return of the Sorcerer" (a kindred tale in more than one sense, I think). It's a notorious magical cookbook, not a hoary trove of unmentionable pre-human lore the way that it becomes in, say, "The Dunwich Horror."

Unlike "The Rats in the Walls," there's not much shift in the reader's appreciation of the speaker's context from the opening of the story to its closing: in any case, he's the subject of outre phenomena writing an account before his suicide.

>7 AndreasJ:

Yes, "demonic" would have been the even simpler term that would have been chosen by the average pulp fiction writer. I think I first ran across the term "cacodemon" in Dungeons & Dragons, aeons ago!

The ghoul-hound really makes for a fearsome image at the end:

For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was the bony thing my friend and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom.

The idea of the living bat-cloak is a novel one, giving the creature an additional vampiric aura.

As said by others: not Lovecraft's best, but a fun read. I must admit I have a foible for this one because it's the only one that's (partially) set in my native country. I've toyed with the idea of writing a sort of prequel: a short story about my fellow countryman who's grave gets robbed there.

When I first read "The Hound" I had never been to Europe at all. Even though Lovecraft certainly never visited, and didn't offer much in the way of local color, my own past travels in the Netherlands enhanced my affection for the story this time.

Obviously this story doesn't hide its influences. There's the Poe-esque narrator at the point of death, telling the story of how he came be in this situation (this is surely just a literary convention, I can't imagine who he would be telling). There's the Baudelaire and Huysmans influences on the narrator and St John's "bad boy" personas.

I can't decide whether or not Lovecraft meant to suggest that they were gay. On the one hand HPL was a particularly sexless person. On the other, 'decadent' was generally understood to mean homosexual since the arrest of Oscar Wilde.

Perhaps a third influence - on the actual plot of the story - was M. R. James. There are echoes of "A Warning to the Curious" and "Count Magnus" in particular (an undead guardian of a buried treasure in "Warning" and a relentless pursuit by un unwittingly-summoned undead in "Magnus". In both stories the protagonist ends up dead.)

I read in this story's Wikipedia entry that the Hound has been identified as an early version of a ghoul in HPL's fiction. I would have thought that it was more likely to be a vampire - it IS dead (or undead); it's associated with bats, and of course Dracula can manifest himself in canine form.

Of course one indication that this is an early story is its Old World setting, before HPL mythologised his own backyard (as it were) and claimed it (artistically) as his own. There's an interesting parallel with Ramsey Campbell, I think, in that for his early stories he created an English version of Arkham and environs (Gloucestershire, I think. On the England/Wales border. Machen country.). Later stories were set in his native Merseyside.

Joshi has a theory, as I recall, that many of Lovecraft's early works are echoed and improved in later ones. Here the decadent narrator and his pal bring to mind the college crowd in "The Thing on the Doorstep".

There really is a lot of attention to dead human bodies in Lovecraft. Here we have grave robbers. His collaboration with Eddy, "The Loved Dead" is of course, veiled necrophilia. "Imprisoned with the Pharoahs" is sort of in this vein via the classic image of mummies. Curwen messes with sort of condensed bodies in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. And there's the ghouls of "Pickman's Model". It's never a reveling in gore, more contemplation of the aesthetics of the dead as highly evocative bits of matter. (Of course, the body is fascinating for lots of weird/horror writers.

>12 housefulofpaper: Yes, I was definitely reminded of M.R. James.

The narrator and his friend could be thought to be trapped in a sort of folie de deux , and I couldn't help but think their search for ever more powerful, decadent thrills was probably going to end up in murder like Leopold and Loeb.

>8 paradoxosalpha:

The writing of "The Hound" in 1922 is great fodder for Gavin Callaghan's thesis that HPL's horror fiction had a satirical aim directed against cultural and aesthetic decadents.

Along the same lines, S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (in An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia et al.) characterize this tale as self-parody. Either way, it is almost certainly comedic in intent.

>12 housefulofpaper:

Obviously this story doesn't hide its influences. There's the Poe-esque narrator at the point of death, telling the story of how he came be in this situation (this is surely just a literary convention, I can't imagine who he would be telling). There's the Baudelaire and Huysmans influences on the narrator and St John's "bad boy" personas.

Don't forget the direct reference to Poe in the mention of the "red death" and the nod to Ambrose Bierce ("that damned thing"). Joshi and Schultz (in An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia again) also see a reference to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles in the baying of the hound, and HPL scholar Steven J. Mariconda has pointed out many references in the narrative to Huysmans' A Rebours.

>12 housefulofpaper:

The thing is identified as having originally been a ghoul:

I think it was the dark rumour and legendry, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre.

Who knows what it became after death? A ghoul-vampire? It seems to have been filling itself in with grue from recent meals, which is a pretty awful thought in itself. Just curious, Andrew - did you listen to the audio version?

12, 13

I can also see an M.R. James influence. Perhaps "The Hound" was even a further influence on the 1957 film Curse of the Demon (aka Night of the Demon), which adds a fearsome monster to the adaptation of the much more subtle James story, "Casting the Runes".

>13 RandyStafford:

St. John and the narrator do seem to have about reached the limit as far as the aesthetics of grave robbing, don't they? Torture and murder could only have been around the corner for this dynamic duo, as indicated by:

Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St. John was always the leader, and he it was who led the way...

Such infamous team-ups as Leopold & Loeb, Lucas & O'Toole and Bianchi & Buono do come to mind. Good thing the Hound intervened!

The ghouls in this story are the narrator and St. John. The revenant creature is a former ghoul: he "had had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre." He was as they are now, or so they understand, and thus dignify him with the label "ghoul."

>16 paradoxosalpha:

But have the narrator and St. John have actually partaken of grave munchies? That's what makes the ghoul. Otherwise they are merely upscale grave robbers, whatever else they may aspire to be. We can only guess at what their "predatory excursions" actually entail.

> 16

That was how I read it - the Hound had been a ghoulish person when alive, rather than a flesh-eating undead thing. He became that - with the boundaries between Ghoul, Vampire, and Werewolf rather blurred - post mortem.

> 15

I listened to both - the William Roberts and the Roddy McDowell (although there's an unfortunate glitch on the upload to YouTube of McDowell's reading).

By a coincidence, I've just bought a 2nd volume of HPL readings by Roberts (William Roberts (III) on IMDB, I believe) comprising "The Thing on the Doorstep"; "The Colour Out of Space"; "The Outsider"; "The Doom that Came to Sarnath"; "The Festival" and "The Rats in the Walls".

> 17, 18

It's that emphatic "himself" in the key quote that makes it clear to me that the narrator and St. John consider themselves to be ghouls, although perhaps in a broader, non-cannibalistic sense.

They're certainly ghouls in Wiktionary's 2nd definition:

2. A graverobber; a person with an undue interest in death and corpses.

(The first definition is the more "Lovecraftian" one:

1. (mythology, folklore) A spirit said to feed on corpses.

)

ETA: Cf also the narrator's claim "We were no vulgar ghouls" - apparently he thought them tasteful or sophisticated ghouls.

> 20

Yes they certainly are that, but the reason I raised the subject was to quibble over whether the Hound was a ghoul as HPL presented it in, for example, "Pickman's Model", or whether it was a vampire.

And (I should make clear) my quibble was with the writer of the Wikipedia entry, rather than with anyone here.

21 > I agree the Hound isn't a Pickmanian ghoul.

On a wholly different tack, in the half-coherent final paragraph, the narrator asserts that "Madness rides the star-wind". On re-reading (I originally read this before I read any of HPL's later works) this struck me as unexpectedly "cosmic" in a story otherwise devoid of alien gods or extraterrestrials. Just a rhetorical flourish, or meant to imply some extraterrene origin or connection to the Hound?

There's no reason for HPL to stick to a single definition of "ghoul" in both "The Hound" (1922) and "Pickman's Model" (1927). My impression of the hounding spirit/corpse in this week's story is that it is rather sui generis, while "Pickman's Model" adumbrates a gruesome hidden race. So regardless of terminology, I think they're rather different horrors. For more ghouls like Pickman's, we can look to "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" (ca. 1927), but notwithstanding the wikipedia reference mentioned in #13, I don't see a plain linear development of Pickman and his ghoul kin from the centuried Dutch monster and his Oriental talisman of five years earlier.

ETA: What we definitely do have, is a continued exploitation of charnel imagery.

The "hound" seems to dine on the living (St. John; the family in "a squalid thieves’ den"). The how & why behind events in this tale is a little murky, to say the least.

> 22 "Madness rides the star-wind."

I think this is supposed to be the sort of florid expostulation one could expect from one who "followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui," and now brought to a suicidal extremity of fear. It's as Romantic as it is "cosmic."

This is a wonderful discussion. I disagree with the idea that "The Hound" was meant by Lovecraft to be a "self parody"; he wrote it early in his career, and he was always very serious about his own writing, for he strove to create good fiction. It may be that, with this tale, Lovecraft was poking a bit of fun at the prodigality of Bohemianism as found in certain works of Wilde and Huysmans and Baudelaire (although he had, if I remember correctly, the highest regard for Baudelaire's poetry). But the idea that this very serious weird writer wou'd deliberately make fun of his own genre writing seems highly unlikely. And if he wasn't serious in his writing of the tale, I doubt he would then be so dismissive of it in later life, when he considered the work an artistic failure and referred to it as "a dead dog."

I find the story wonderful, entertaining and effective. It has a nightmarish quality that comes, in part, from its ambiguity--we never know what the hell is really going on. It leaves many questions unanswered. I have sought to give my own understanding of the story by writing a sequel to it, "Some Distant Baying Sound"--but to write any kind of "explanation" to so surreal a story is probably an aesthetic error.