During one of their exploits to a grave of another well-known tomb raider, they uncover a casket with remains that seem to have been shattered by a wild animal, yet the corpse is still whole. During their digging, they hear a howling a giant hound. The morbid duo finds an ancient amulet from the neck of the long since dead corpse in the coffin. As they take it, they hear the howls yet again.
When the men return back home, the howling begins to haunt them and in the end, St. John is killed by a mysterious beast. Scared, the narrator intends to take the medallion back hence he found it, but it is stolen from him. The next day, he reads news of a group of thieves killed by a monster of sorts. Now mad in fear, he returns to the grave and digs it open, only to find the amulet from the hands of the skeleton, which is now covered with blood and bits of flesh. As the skeleton begins to howl, the narrator finally flees in panic. The final lines indicate, that the text is actually a suicide note and that the narrator finds the suicide to be his final refuge from the monster that now haunts him.
The Hound is the tale where the book written by the mad Arab Alhazred is finally named as the Necronomicon. The titular creature is also thought by some to be an early form of a ghoul Lovecraft later used in some of his stories.
As a whole, Lovecraft wasn't that keen about the story, dismissing it as a piece of junk. This is a sentiment some of the Lovecraft critics share, but personally, I do find the premise intriguing, especially if you start to think about the concept as a whole: two men living together with their secret basement, who are then haunted by a monster waken by their mutual secret.
Not that this most likely unintentional parable makes the story better, but it does make at least somewhat more intriguing if you want to dive down that particular rabbit hole. It also deserves to be mentioned, that the main characters of the story are particularly creepy little bastards thanks to their devotion to their perverse hobby.
The Lurking Fear (1922) In this another serial ala Herbert West, yet another unnamed narrator travels to Catskills mountains to look for scary things, him being a self-proclaimed connoisseur of scary stuff. He is looking for clues of weird creatures that have been attacking the populace of the area. 75 people have been killed because of the attacks, which seem to originate from the vicinity of now ramshackle Martensen Mansion. Together with his bodyguards, the narrator goes to the mansion with intention of staying a night. The narrator falls asleep but is woken only to find his companions gone missing. He witnesses a shadow of a monstrous creature, which shocks him profoundly, especially because his bodyguards are newer found again.
After the shocking night, the Narrator meets reporter Arthur Munroe, whom he tells his tale. Together they begin to look into the mystery of the monster as well as what happened to the Martensen family. They end up hiding a thunderstorm in a cabin in the woods after finding a diary of one of the Martensen. While hiding the storm, a thunderbolt clashes near the cabin and Martensen goes to look if it made any damage, staring out the window, like frozen. When the narrator goes to him, he finds Munroe dead, with his face gnawed off.
A couple of months pass and the Narrator returns to the mountains, determined to solve the mystery once and for all. He is now convinced, that the mysterious disappearance of the Martensen's is connected to the monsters. This part of the story is really about the history of the family, but lead by the clues he finds, the Narrator finally finds the grave of Jan Martensen, who died in his family mansion after having left them for years.
The Narrator digs the grave to find an underground burrow filled with almost humanlike creatures. He finds that the surroundings of the mansion are filled with mounds leading to the burrows, which are the dwellings of cannibalistic creatures that have been attacking people. After he learns, that the creatures are related to Martensen's, they have their distinctive dual coloured eyes, he escapes and sends men to explode the whole hill to the ground. But still, he is haunted by the idea, that some of the creatures survived.
The Lurking Fear lacks the tongue in cheek tone of Herbert West and is more of a traditional and more typical horror story for Lovecraft. This time around, he didn't do summaries of what had happened before, but still, there is clumsiness in how the tale is told, which stems from the same reason why Herber West was clumsily told: Lovecraft just couldn't stretch the story enough in order to write actually an encaptivating serial story. This is definitely the kind of a story that would have worked better had Lovecraft done it in his usual style, but now it drags and feels overly padded for what it is.
The Rats in the Walls (1923) The last descendant of De la Poers, who is now known as Delapore after his grandparents moved to America from England, decides to purchase back his ancestral home in order to rebuild it to its former glory. But as he tries to do so, he soon learns how ill-regarded his family name still is among the populace, making the process harder as few people want to work with, or for, him.
After the mansion is built, Delapore finds it difficult to sleep because of noises coming from the walls. His cats, which he has multiple of, go crazy during the nights but the servants don't seem to hear the noises as audible as Delapore does. He seeks outside help and ends up finding an underground city beneath the mansion, filled with skeletons and prison cages. The city is centuries old, having buildings from several different cultures, like the Roman times, there.
This is where the dark secrets of his family finally reveal themselves in their full horror: his family has been the head of an ancient cult that partook in cannibalism. Delapore succumbs into madness and scurries away into a dark cave, where he is finally found with the body of his dead friend, whom he has been cannibalizing.
The Rats in the Walls is a fantastic horror story and is often considered one of the finest pieces Lovecraft wrote. It takes the trope he often used, the hidden and horrific family history, and churns out a story, that doesn't leave prisoners in its wake. He doesn't allow the Dealpore to escape from what he and his family are and have always been; the conduits of dark, twisted gods long since forgotten.
Perhaps the biggest blemish of the story is the cat of Delapore. Not because he is handled poorly, but because of what his name is. Lovecraft named the most loved pet of Delapore after his own childhood cat, a name which you can probably guess with ease. There's no real reason why the cat is named thus, other than it is black, so there you go. In later publications, the name of the cat has changed to Black Tom or something similar, so it is entirely possible to read a version of the story without the original name present, but as the collection I have has uncensored writings, there is no escaping the name. The name of the cat is often discussed in link to Lovecraft's well documented racial views.
The terrible cat name aside, The Rats in the Walls is a great story. It is suspenseful, well written and plotted. It's also the story that made one Robert E. Howard to write a praising letter of it to Weird Tales magazine. The letter was then forwarded to Lovecraft which resulted in their mutual correspondence that lasted till Howard's suicide in 1936. That little connection aside, it is the kind of a story that illustrates finely why Lovecraft is still considered as one the greatest horror writers and why many are willing to look past his nastier tendencies. With the themes of horror and insanity, Lovecraft's work is at its best unsurpassed.
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