The Hound and Another Eldritch Tale | H.P. Lovecraft | Nightshade Diary Podcast
The Hound is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft published in the 1924 issue of Weird Tales. It is notable for containing the first mention of Lovecraft's fictional grimoire, the Necronomicon, and is considered part of the Cthulhu Mythos.
The story follows an unnamed narrator and his friend St. John, who are obsessed with grave-robbing and have built a macabre museum in their basement filled with preserved bodies, skulls, mummies, and other grotesque artifacts. Their obsession leads them to a Holland churchyard to exhume the tomb of a legendary grave robber. They discover a jade amulet in the shape of a winged hound with a semi-canine face, which they recognize as described in the Necronomicon. After stealing it, they are pursued by a monstrous hound, leading to the death of St. John and the narrator’s descent into madness.
The Mound is a horror and science fiction novella by H.P. Lovecraft, written in 1929– as a ghostwriter for Zealia Bishop, based on her brief premise: "There is an Indian mound near here, which is haunted by a headless ghost. Sometimes it is a woman." Lovecraft expanded this into a tale of a hidden underground civilization, K’n-yan, beneath a mound in Oklahoma.
The story is narrated by an ethnologist who investigates local legends of a man pacing the mound by day and a headless woman by night. He discovers a cylinder containing a scroll written by Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez, a 16th-century Spanish explorer who stumbled upon the subterranean realm. K’n-yan is ruled by an immortal, telepathic race that worships Cthulhu, Yig, Shub-Niggurath, and formerly Tsathoggua. They practice sadism, biological modification, and ritualistic torture, and live in a decaying, decadent society.
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