"The Hound" is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft in September 1922 and published in the February 1924 issue of Weird Tales.

Upon opening the casket, they see that several places on the skeletal remains appear torn and shattered, as if attacked by a wild animal, yet the whole of the skeleton is still completely distinguishable.

They examine it and, after some observation, they recognize the amulet as one mentioned in "the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred."

One night, St. John is violently attacked and killed by a mysterious creature, which the narrator claims the amulet had brought unto him.

Slowly going insane, he returns to the churchyard and exhumes the coffin once more, only to find the skeleton within covered in caked blood and bits of flesh and hair, holding the lost amulet in its hand.

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.

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.

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.

"[5] Mariconda also points to the heavy debt the story owes to Edgar Allan Poe, an influence acknowledged by several borrowed phrases: Though Lovecraft chose "The Hound" as one of the five stories he initially submitted to Weird Tales, his main professional outlet, he later dismissed it as "a dead dog"[7] and "a piece of junk".

[8] Some critics have shared Lovecraft's deprecation; Lin Carter called it "a minor little tale" that is "slavishly Poe-esque in style".