The Hound - Inspiration

Inspiration

On September 16, 1922, Lovecraft toured the Flatbush Reformed Church in Brooklyn with his friend Rheinhart Kleiner, writing about the visit in a letter:

Around the old pile is a hoary churchyard, with internments dating from around 1730 to the middle of the nineteenth century.... From one of the crumbling gravestones--dated 1747--I chipped a small piece to carry away. It lies before me as I write--and ought to suggest some sort of horror-story. I must place it beneath my pillow as I sleep... who can say 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?

Lovecraft wrote "The Hound" shortly afterwards, using as the name of one of the main characters his nickname for his companion Kleinhart, "St. John". The grave that is fatefully robbed in the story is in a "terrible Holland churchyard"--perhaps a reference to Flatbush church being part of the Dutch Reformed Church.

Critic Steven J. Mariconda suggests that the story is a tribute to the Decadent literary movement in general and in particular Joris-Karl Huysmans' A rebours, an 1884 novel that Lovecraft greatly admired. (Huysmans is mentioned by name in the story, along with Baudelaire.) Like "The Hound"'s protagonists, victims of a "devastating ennui", the main character of A rebours suffers from an "overpowering tedium" that leads him to "imagine and then indulge in unnatural love-affairs and perverse pleasures."

Mariconda also points to the heavy debt the story owes to Edgar Allan Poe, an influence acknowledged by several borrowed phrases:

The "oblong box" exumed, the mysterious "knock on my chamber door", and the "red death" brought by the Hound all echo Poe's phraseology.