Cthulhu Mythos
"The Hound" contains several references to the body of lore known as the Cthulhu Mythos that Lovecraft shared with other horror writers. Most notably, it marks the first appearance of one of Lovecraft's most famous literary creations--the forbidden book known as the Necronomicon. Lovecraft had mentioned its author a year earlier, in "The Nameless City", but here for the first time named the book. Referring to an amulet found on a grave-robbing expedition, the narrator relates:
- Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead.
The reference to "Leng" is one of the first mentions of Lovecraft's imaginary plateau, having only appeared before in 1920s "Celephais". Here placed in Central Asia, Leng is also associated in Lovecraft's writings with Antarctica and his imaginary Dreamlands.
Lovecraftian scholar Will Murray, pointing to the "semi-canine face" on the amulet as well as the "corpse-eating cult" of Leng, suggests that the titular creature of "The Hound" "probably represents an early form of the ghoul as Lovecraft would develop it."
Read more about this topic: The Hound