- 🔀 This is an article about the creature. For the short story, see The Hound (short story)
| “ | It was the oddly conventionalised figure of a crouching winged hound, or sphinx with a semi-canine face, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade. The expression on its features was repellent in the extreme, savouring at once of death, bestiality, and malevolence... ...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. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound, and I saw that it held in its gory, filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter. |
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| ~ H. P. Lovecraft , "The Hound" |
Little is known about the titular creature from the H. P. Lovecraft short story "The Hound". It is not known whether the hound is one of a race of hounds or a unique mutation of another race, although the narrator links it to the Plateau of Leng. The beast appeared to have had a particular affinity for an ancient amulet buried with the body of a 15th century Dutch graverobber.
This creature appears like a giant winged hound or sphinx with a canine face, and is accompanied by a swarm of unusually large bats. The Necronomicon, by Abdul Alhazred, refers to it as the symbol of a corpse-eating cult from the Plateau of Leng in Central Asia, and as a "supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead".
The hound was first encountered by St. John and his companion in a graveyard in the Netherlands. After this first encounter, it apparently followed the pair all the way back to their native England, where it brutally killed St. John. (HPL: "The Hound")