"The Hound"

by H.P. Lovecraft

originally published Weird Tales, February 1924

Our Narrator and his bff St. John are setting up housekeeping in a manner that would make the Addams family blanch - robbing graves to decorate their house full of skulls, bodies, sinister books, headstones, freakish art and weird-ass musical instruments that they make weird-ass music on (gawd, HPL woulda loved Harry Partch!).

St. John gets wind of the grave of a tomb raider, who is said to have stolen something "potent" which is presumably buried with him.  They travel to Holland and dig up the several-hiundred year-old corpse, not giving much thought to the sound of an unusually large hound baying in the distance.  

The coffin is strange and elaborate, and its occupant is torn up, as if by wild animals. There is a jade amulet they recognize from the Necronomicon around the corpse's neck.  They take the amulet and head for home.

Bad news, boy.  The baying of the hound follows them home.  Weird noises are heard inside the house.  Then St. John gets his ass torn to shreds by some kind of animal.  O.N. destroys all the creepy bric-a-brac and flees, intending to return the amulet to the grave they stole it from.  But someone steals it from him.  The next day he finds  a story in the morning paper about a band of thieves who've been dismembered by some unknown animal.

He goes to the Holland graveyard anyway, and finds the corpse is covered in caked blood and bits of flesh and hair.  It also has the amulet. And starts baying at him.  He flees and plans to kill himself.

This one always surprises me whenever I re-read it because its so over-the-top in almost every way.  The morbid home of St. John and the nameless narrator is so crazed its comical, and if I didn't know that HPL wasn't prone to humor I'd think it was meant to be funny.  

After the purplish intro this becomes something like a particularly crazed and surreal EC horror comics tale.  Its about as close as HPL ever got to "splatter".  

Not one of his greatest tales, but terrifically effective and great spooky horror fun!