The Hound review: impeccable taste, rotten judgment

The Hound is a story about two people who have mistaken an appetite for a taste. The narrator and St. John keep exhausting artistic movements, looking for the next sensation, until admiration gives way to grave robbery. Their problem is not a lack of discernment. They can appreciate an object very closely while refusing to recognize any limit on possessing it. Lovecraft makes that combination repulsive before the stolen amulet starts causing trouble.

Written in 1922 and first published in Weird Tales in February 1924, this is an extravagant little Gothic nightmare. Its opening announces catastrophe, so suspense depends less on guessing whether the collectors will suffer than on watching their cherished arrangements come apart. They have designed a private experience of horror. The story's pleasure lies in seeing how little authority that design gives them over a frightening encounter.

The underground museum is the best reason to read it. Carved mouths emit colored light. Hidden pneumatic pipes animate the hangings and supply chosen odors. The room combines machinery, display, and human remains into something like a gruesome private theater. Everything is arranged to provide a particular sensation on demand. Even the atmosphere has a control system.

That technical care extends to their expeditions. The narrator insists that mood, weather, moonlight, and the handling of the soil matter to the experience. He worries over aesthetic clumsiness while describing an act of desecration. The contrast gives the story a vicious little comedy: impeccable presentation becomes a way to avoid considering what is being presented. These men can tell you why the lighting is wrong before they can admit the problem with their hobby.

The green jade amulet sharpens the judgment. They recognize its design from the fictional Necronomicon and immediately want it. Knowledge increases its appeal. This is a useful reversal of the familiar horror reader who fails to notice a warning: the collectors can identify that there is something to worry about, and the connection makes the acquisition more satisfying. Expertise has become another excuse to reach into the coffin.

Once the haunting follows them home, sound does particularly good work. The distant baying cannot be placed with confidence; later noises trouble the house's doors and windows. Compare that with the museum's carefully distributed smells and moving fabric. Their controlled sensory arrangement has been joined by something they cannot reliably locate or summon. The collectors' experience of horror no longer waits for them to choose a setting.

There is a serious limitation, and it is also part of the attraction: the prose is spectacularly overfed. Dread, disgust, and elaborate description crowd together with very little plain speech for contrast. If ornate declarations make you hear the author clearing his throat, the spell may break early. An appreciative reading need not pretend every sentence becomes more frightening with another embellishment. Sometimes the excess is more interesting as the narrator's performance of cultivated horror than as a direct way to scare us.

Choose The Hound when you want that performance pushed until it becomes a liability. Its strongest image is the collection as an environment its owners have built to flatter their appetites. For artists, the useful question is what an object's presentation makes its audience overlook. Our Mezzotint and Yellow Sign reviews offer other encounters between images and uneasy interpretation. Here, the collector's eye remains sharp; it is the collector's judgment that has gone rotten.

Questions from the crypt

Sources & further reading

• H. P. Lovecraft: The Hound, full primary text, The H. P. Lovecraft Archive
• The H. P. Lovecraft Archive: The Hound publication history
• The H. P. Lovecraft Archive: fiction chronology

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