"Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world, where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St. John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui." So begins this tale of Lovecraft horror. Most unfortunately, how to deal with ennui, that is, one’s boredom, has been a huge, huge ongoing issue in the West, particularly in the last two hundred years.

To underline this point, there is hardly a novel written in nineteenth century Europe where at least one character doesn’t have an issue with their "devastating ennui." And the narrator in this Lovecraft tale who suffers from boredom complains of the "commonplaces of the prosaic world." A question we could pose: My good man, is the world really as commonplace, dull and prosaic as you make it out? Perhaps, sir, this dullness has nothing to do with the world but everything to do with your deadened perceptions, jaded worldview and dreary, lackluster mental state.

This gentleman and his aristocratic partner turn to aesthetics for a possible cure: "The enigmas of the Symbolists and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon of its diverting novelty and appeal. Only the somber philosophy of the Decadents could hold us, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills."

From the narrator’s tone, it sounds they have been pondering Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, with such lines as: "Just an angel with evil eye/ I shall return to thee silently/ Upon thy bower I'll alight/ With falling shadows of the night" and Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Là-Bas (Down There), a novel of Satanism, sadism and torture. The narrator tells us when it comes to reading these Decadents, he is "exhausted of thrills." Ha! To envision literature as a kind of top ten roller-coaster ride, a way to get your kicks and jollies. These works of Baudelaire and Huysmans could be infinitely rich and enlivening if one reads with creative engagement rather than placing the onus on the author to provide you, the reader, with a series of unending thrills.

Such a jaded sense of the world can have, especially in a Lovecraft tale, horrifying consequences. The narrator continues: "Until finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. t was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.”

Well, my goodness! Our engagement with a work of art or literature can be uplifting, inspiring, even transforming but such vital experiences according to aestheticians Kant, Shelling and Schopenhauer are part of life’s fabric not the totality of life. Gentlemen, please, accept the natural flow of being alive - no need to go grave digging! On a somewhat humorous note, I can just imagine Arthur Schopenhauer and Immanuel Kant, shovel in hand, on a moonlight night, digging up a grave.

And the narrator provides us with a glimpse of his exploring the nuances of a new form of highly original, highly refined performance art. “The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and moonlight. These pastimes were to us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care.” Well, if you are going to dig up corpses in a graveyard, please devote loving care and heightened attention to each step, embellishing every spadeful of dirt with a distinctive flourish as if you are performing on oboe or violin!

Lovecraft’s flair for creating metaphor and turn of phrase in the lavish style of high baroque, employing ornate, highly polished language, is most befitting for the ghoulish, chilling events that transpire in this gruesome tale. The narrator goes on to describe the details of his newly conceived subterranean museum, monstrous and unspeakable, an entire museum constructed to house his infernal graveyard bounty. But, there came a time, our artist of the diabolical haltingly confesses, in a Holland graveyard, when the wheel of nocturnal fortune took a decidedly bad turn.

Any aesthetic satisfaction the two British grave-robbers received in their past grisly undertakings is transformed into disorientation and terror once they pilfer a particular amulet from a most peculiar Dutch coffin. Alarm, dread, apprehension, horror and impending doom become their constant companions. Indeed, every horrifying hour of every ensuing day, including a number of unexpected, violent, harrowing deaths, leads our narrator to the decision he notes in the first sentences of his tale: he is about to put a revolver to his head to blow out his brains.

143 s Bill KerwinAuthor 3 books83.3k


One evening, in September of 1922, H.P. Lovecraft visited a Brooklyn graveyard and took a souvenir home with him, a small chip from a tombstone dated 1747. Later, he began to muse, in a letter: “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?” This short story, first published in Weird Tales in 1924, is the result of these musings.

Although it is not one of Lovecraft’s best, it is notable for a few reasons: 1) “Herbert West,” it is one of H.P.’s rare attempts at deliberate humor (if you don’t believe it is deliberate, just count the number of times H.P. repeats the old Baskerville cliché, a “gigantic hound”), 2) it is the only instance where the author chooses to make his heroes Huysman-style decadents, complete with crippling ennui, a collection of degenerate art, and their very own “perfume organ”, and 3) it is the first recorded mention of the Necronomicon.

Lovecraft later termed it a “piece of junk,” but that is a rather harsh condemnation. It is obvious that the author had a good time writing it, and I bet you have fun reading it too.20th-c-amer weird-fiction76 s Peter3,315 560

Fast paced and extreme tale of horror! Two friends, interested in everything sinister and macabre, have an occult museum in the lowest basement of their house. When they rob an ancient amulet from the grave of a magician strange things occur. They hear the baying of a great dog and St John (one of the friends) is torn to pieces by an eerie vulture creature. Will his friend survive? Will the hauntings end when he gives back the amulet? Here we have all ingredients for a great horror story: uncanny objects, body snatching, demons and the reference of The Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. This story goes bump in the night. Absolutely recommended!horror39 s Mir4,896 5,201

A pair of rather naive and harmless "decadents" whose main kink seems to digging up and collecting bits of dead bodies rob the wrong grave. A.... wait for it.... DUTCH grave! You know those Dutch and their cursed jade figurines and slavering ghouls. I mean, you read the Necronomicon, right? It definitely warns you about Holland. Er, wait, that warning was about jade amulets. Or was it dogs? Anyway, this was obviously a poorly planned vacation and SOMETHING EVIL follows St John and his pal back to their isolated ancient manor-house on a bleak and unfrequented moor where they hang out servantless a couple of poser goth kids admiring their skull collection and pretending to worship demons without expecting to ever raise one for real.

4 stars is maybe a touch too generous but if you give up expecting horror this story is quite funny and contains winks to Poe, Doyle, Bierce et al writers HPL enjoyed.

27 s Michael || TheNeverendingTBR487 262

"Madness rides the star-wind . . . claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses . . . dripping death astride a Bacchanale of bats from night-black ruins of buried temples of Belial. . . . Now, as the baying of that dead, fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings circles closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnamable."


Definitely prefer his shorter works.16 s Dimitris116 56

Why should any horror story lover read The Hound? Because it marks the first appearance of one of Lovecraft's most famous literary creations—the forbidden book known as the Necronomicon! MWA HA HA!!!
12 s Scarlet Cameo619 397

"¡Que perdone el cielo la locura y la morbosidad que atrajeron sobre nosotros tan monstruosa suerte!"

La estupidez adolescente y las leyendas se combinan para crear una historia excelente, donde queda claro que cada acción deja consecuencias y que las criaturas creadas por Lovecraft trascienden su época, además de la influencia que han tenido escritores de culto en el autor. Una excelente historia para adentrarse en el estilo del autor, pero no todavía en su mitología.11 s ? Irena ?1,652 221

The Hound is one of the weirdest and longest suicide letters I've read. Told in the first person by an unnamed narrator, it is a story of the last days of the two friends who were trying to beat the boredom. After a very long search, they turned to macabre and eventually the quest to end their 'devastating ennui' led them to grave robbing.

Only this time they robbed the wrong grave.horror8 s Leo4,559 485

I d it but felt it was a little bit to short for my liking, but then again I often feel that with short stories. But a cool concept.8 s Brian 421 5

I haven't read Lovecraft for months and I had forgotten the beauty of his prose. He wrote an excellent piece here (thank you again to Glen Russel for his review!). Lovecraft writes with power to transpose your reality into a new one. His descriptions create a world of damp darkness and ascending terror. The character in the story made me remember my desire to see Indiana Jones and The Call of Cthulhu. This story extends the story of the Necrononicon. Grave robbers, lusting for secret knowledge, take an amulet from an ancient grave, stealing from of figure, a sphinx with wings and the face of a Hound. When he goes home with his assistant, phantom sounds haunt him. His assistant gets shredded to death, as if by a Velociraptor. Children die, and these events parallel the echo of a howling hound. I found this entertaining and delightful.7 s Jerry Jose367 59

This ghastly tale of two tomb raiders marks the very first appearance of Lovecraft’s infamous forbidden book, Necronomicon.

Two seemingly low life robbers, St. John and the narrator, who shares this vile interest in defiling centuried graves for logical pelf, goes to Nether–lands (literally!) to excavate/rob an ancient ghoul. Though the nocturnal expedition is repeatedly disturbed by background bayings of a hound, they unearth an old jaded amulet (semi canine faced) with sinister inscriptions that can be traced to those of old Arab daemonologist, Abdul Alhazred. Pulling it from the eerily fresh and torn carcass of ghoul, they flee home with the souvenir. With it came strange sounds and happenings.

Narrative took a turn from there, at least for me. Initial reluctant first person account suggested the grave excavations not being a profession of choice, but lack of options. But, as story progressed the complex and perverse nature of narrator and St. John’s relationship brought a new outlook to the happenings. For once, the narrator felt somewhat reliable to me. Though their deeper obsession towards occult and their own recluse cult of necrophilia suggested otherwise, I was inclined to read them with Lovecraft’s life and company(thanks to Paul La Farge’s Night Ocean); and to focus more on ‘material constants’ of the story than perceptions of narrator. Also it would be safe to admit that much of my thoughts changed after finishing the story.

The ending, now that I think back, shared a strong resemblance with my first lovecraftian tale ‘The Dagon‘ and I couldn’t help but read it along with his opening line from The Call of Cthulhu, “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents“. The more I thought about the hound, the more it started to appear the proto bed rock for modern cursed artefact adventures (ignoring the crude morale and admitting the weak comparison) from Indiana Jones to Nathan Drake and I began to form a vampirish interpretation of the same.

Nevertheless, terror inscribed in the writing made the story all the more atmospheric if not a bit Poe-esque. Or Howard might say, ‘it’s a charnel premise of abhorrence and cosmicism‘. 7 s James HoldAuthor 153 books41

Just because an HPL story is short doesn't mean it's easy. Clocking in at just under 3000 words, The Hound gives us tongue-twisters 'illimitable' and the wonderful 'cacodaemonical' along with the Symbolists, the pre-Raphaelites, and Goya; not to mention Baudelaire and Huysmans.

Baudelaire and Huysmans?
I told you not to mention them!

I'd to say 'all joking aside', but I don't see how you can treat this as anything other than a joke. A wonderfully told joke, but a joke all the same.

Two guys grow bored with their normal everyday decadent pursuits and decide to turn to something even more so -- namely grave robbing -- in the course of which they steal an amulet from from the corpse of a rumored bad man, after which they are haunted and pursued by a baying sound. Eventually one gets torn to pieces and the other, the narrator, decides to off himself.

The plot is nothing original -- at least by today's standards. It's been done to death. By maybe in HPL's time it was fresher. What saves it the way he lays it on thick with atmosphere and imagined feelings of fear, although the hound itself is never seen. Something is seen at one point, but in no way does it resemble a hound, so maybe it's a metaphor predating Elvis' song 'Hound Dog'. HPL and Elvis. Now there's an image to conjure with.

Anyway, it's not bad. Nor is it particularly good. HPL wrote much better stuff than this and a few things that were worse. If you're an HPL fan you'll it. If you're not a fan, this is not the one you'd want to start out with.6 s Iloveplacebo384 240



Reto: La Mansión Encantada - del grupo 'La cafetería de Audrey'.
Tema: hombres lobo (2).2017 authors-male read-in-spanish ...more6 s Gabyal535 7

Es un relato corto, la manera en cómo está presentado me gustó. La ambientación que le da, la descripción detallada de los lugares, lo que va sucediendo conforme avanza la trama, hace que se te pongan los vellos de punta y percibas lo que siente el narrador. Todo acto tiene una consecuencia y ese acto le costó caro a uno de ellos.m-encantada-20175 s Maliha Tabassum Tisha127 389

(Listened to Horrorbabble's audiobook (special edition) narrated by Ian Gordon.)

Audio: 4 stars
Story: 2 stars2021 audiobook classic ...more6 s Skylar Phelps242 33

Awesome! Great short fiction. 4 s David Sarkies1,852 335

Becareful what you steal
6 June 2023 – Battle

So, here I am sitting in a pub in the town of Battle in England, where I have just finished walking around a sheep filled paddock where almost 1000 years ago a bunch of Normans (or should I call them French because, well, they spoke French, though some people claim that Normans weren’t French) decisively beat the English and completely changed the course of history. However, I’m not going to talk about that, or any of the vignettes that I could come up with, but rather this short story.

It makes me wonder to what extent the author can change a story to make it a different story, even though the plot seems to be similar to other stories that I have read. Mind you, it has been a while since I’ve read a Lovecraft story, and I can’t really remember many of the ones that I read six months ago, let alone five years. Still, I vaguely remember something similar to this story.

Well, apparently it is the first mention of the book the Necronomicon and the guy who wrote it came from Central Asia. That I found interesting because Cthulu’s city is supposed to be located at the point of inaccessibility in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, so it seems that the author of the Necronomicon comes from what one could consider the opposite point of inaccessibility, namely the point of land that is the farthest point from any body of water, or at least from the oceans if you don’t count the Caspian Sea (which is an inland sea, so technically doesn’t count).

Anyway, this is a story about a couple of introverts, though I suspect that I am putting that lightly – I think recluse is a much better term to describe them. Anyway, they have this hobby of robbing graves (pretty macabre hobby, and I’m not quite sure if you can consider something that is technically illegal a hobby, though I guess you can refer to some guy who sells drugs as having a side hustle).

Well, as is the case with Lovecraft they dig up the wrong grave and steal the wrong treasure (why do D&D adventurers get away with robbing graves but everybody else doesn’t?) which results in a demonic hound coming after them. Mind you, that probably shouldn’t surprise anybody because, well, they are going around robbing graves so, , what are you going to expect from them.

I guess the morale of this story is, don’t make a hobby out of robbing graves. Hell, I might as well say just leave the poor buggers in their graves and find somebody else that is more productive to society.horror3 s Graeme RodaughanAuthor 9 books388

A cautionary tale upon the topic of avoiding charismatic young men named St. John, demonism, the Necronomicon, grave robbing, cursed jade amulets, stocking museums with artefacts stolen from graves, lonely moors, decrepit manors, solitude, dissipation, flocks of bats - and smoking (well actually not smoking...)

3 'Beneath a Livid Sky,' stars.lovecraftian-cosmic-horror3 s Katie T1,056 225

3.5 stars3 s {Alexandra}146

? 4/10 ?3 s Marc D. Hayakawa ?708 77

3.5/5 estrellas.

Grotesco y muy bueno, me entretuvo todo el tiempo.3 s Joshua Gonsalves103

”In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound.”

...and so begins “The Hound”, an incredibly written work by the legendary H.P. Lovecraft. This is probably my personal favourite of his works that I have so far read (I have read very little of Lovecraft, mind you), and it is without a doubt the most amazingly and compellingly stylistic. “The Hound” recalls Edgar Allan Poe more than other Lovecraft stories, featuring an atmosphere more categorized by the eerie and gothic than the weird and unbelievable; however, that is not to say that Lovecraft is merely copying Poe with this story, because the story still has Lovecraft written all over it. Lovecraft’s eccentricities help guide us through this swift downward spiral of a story that has more brilliance and chaos dropping from its opening paragraph than the entirety of most horror stories out there ever come close to having.gothic horror short-stories3 s Berit Lundqvist659 24

A (gay?) couple have a common interest in defiling graves and crypts. They often keep souvenirs from their nightly expeditions, and even have a small museum displaying the objects.

One night, they rob a certain grave in Holland. In the grave, there’s a skeleton with a jade amulette. In the distance, they can hear the howling of a hound.

Spoiler alert: The doggy (or whatever creature it is) is not the cuddly kind.

I the total decandence in this story. And grave openings are actually pretty scary.20213 s Jamie1,282 164

A bit over dramatic, even for Lovecraft, and told from the POV of an evildoer, which I think is unusual for Lovecraft, who tends to prefer narration from the POV of a neutral observer.2 s Henry AcuñaAuthor 2 books5

Great story !!! I d the end !!!!2 s Anabella (anabellasbooks)Author 3 books181

Super bueno!! 5 ??
Recomiendo escucharlo en audiolibro
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