Weird Tales featured many themes such as vampires, werewolves, plant monsters, cats, the undead and, of course, ghosts. One of the animal themes was dogs, man’s best friend. Only these pooches aren’t that friendly…
The Hound of the Baskervilles by A. Conan Doyle (1902) has been an inspiration to all kinds of story writers. To horror writers, in particular those in Weird Tales, it has spawned a breed of genuine monsters, not fake ones. Doyle wrote:
“…A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flames. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog.” (The Hound of the Baskervilles by A. Conan Doyle)
The real Hound was only a dog covered in phosphorous paint but the creature of legend is still fascinating. The Hound of the Baskerville is the best of all false monster stories. Most tales in this school are usually no more sophisticated than your average Scooby Doo cartoon. Doyle’s novel is a highwater mark. Filmed many times, there are versions featuring Stewart Granger, Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Christopher Lee and others.
“The Phantom Wolfhound” by Otis Adelbert Kline (Weird Tales, June 1923) is the first of the Dr. Dorp tales and the first of our Children of the Hound of the Baskervilles. A Mr. Ritsky is haunted by a phantom wolfhound. Dorp and Detective Hoyne discover his niece is creating the ectoplasm that forms the killer ghost. It ends with Ritsky’s throat torn out, and his plan to kill his rich niece exposed. The Baskerville link is fairly obvious with hounds and inheritance. This plot structure will be repeated several times after this story.
“The Hound” By H. P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, February 1924) seems to me a descendant of Doyle’s hound. The plot has two decadents, a nameless narrator and his accomplice St. John’s, who have tried every kind of sin and have finally arrived at grave robbing. In a grave in Holland they find an amulet that they take back to England with them. The occultists hear “…worst of all, the faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound which we could neither see nor definitely place. As we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this selfsame spot, torn and mangled by the claws and teeth of some unspeakable beast.”
The men read hints about the amulet in The Necronomicon. (This is Lovecraft’s first mention of the book and the second time for its author, Abdul Alhazred.) One night the beast kills St. John’s. The narrator burns down the house containing their occult museum of horrors, and runs back to Holland. He opens the grave to find in: “…a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was the bony thing my friend and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom.”
The man returns the necklace but it doesn’t stop the sound of the hound. He knows it will only end when he presses a gun to his head.
The suggestion of a vampire and werewolf in this story is as close as Lovecraft will ever get to traditional horrors. His later Mythos monsters tend toward squamous tentacles and eldritch strangeness.
“The White Dog” (The Old House and Other Tales, trans. 1915) by Feodor Sologub (1926) Listen to it here. A seamtress, Alexandra Ivanovna, is unsatisfied with her life in the town, where other women make fun of her. She recalls her life on the open steppe. She speaks to her grandmother who tells her she is going to die. That night Alexandra turns into her lycanthropic form, a white dog, but is shot dead by two men.
“In the pale green and unreal light of the moon it seemed enormous, so huge a dog was surely never seen on earth. It was thick and fat. The black spot, which began at the head and stretched in uneven strands down the entire spine, seemed like a woman’s loosened hair. No tail was visible, presumably it was turned under. The fur on the body was so short that in the distance the dog seemed wholly naked, and its hide shone dimly in the moonlight, so that altogether it resembled the body of a nude woman, who lay in the grass and bayed at the moon.”
I wonder if Sologub is implying Alexandra is of Cossack descent, being from the steppe? Not surprising that a Russian poet would write something poetic and depressing. What isn’t surprising is Farnsworth Wright using it in the “Weird Tales Reprint” section.
“The Song of the Hound” by Sterling Lanier (Weird Tales, October 1925) was a poem that tells of a poor dog neglected and beaten by his master. A star shines down on the animal in its pen, giving it the idea that it would be good to kill his master. He does then runs free.
“The Power of the Dog” by G. G. Pendarves (Weird Tales, August 1927) is a tale of Arabian sorcery. Benson is the manager of the El Adrar mine. His assistant, Adams, a man with one blue eye and one black, has gone missing. The locals whisper that it was the mysterious Daouad who got him. Adams insulted the man, calling him a dog.
Later Benson encounters the man. Daouad is enjoying himself watching a large black and white dog tear into a smaller yellow dog. Benson steps in, despite his workers trying to stop him, and shoots the black and white dog. He tells his men to bring the yellow dog to his barn. The men do not do this, out of fear of the sorcerer. Benson knows he must do it, or lose face among his men.
He goes to Daouad’s place near the eucalyptus trees, the spot where Evans was said to have disappeared. The sorcerer meets Benson at the bridge. The men exchange words, and Benson calls him a dog just like Adams had. The sorcerer uses his magic to show the white man a charging army out in the desert, led by Daouad himself. Benson doesn’t believe any of it. It’s all an illusion, even the man who sits in the way of that army, a man with one blue eyes and one black.
The soldiers surround Benson, tearing away his clothes. Daouad goes in for the killing stroke. Benson will not grovel, when a yellow shape charges at the sorcerer. It is the yellow dog. All the soldiers have disappeared and only the two men and the dog remain. Daouad and the dog fall off the bridge into the river. The sorcerer’s dead body floats away. Benson retrieves the dog, wanting to give it a decent burial. It is then he notices the animal has one blue eye and one black.
G. G. Pendarves (1885-1938) was Gladys Gordon Trenery, an English writer. She specialized in Arabian flavored tales, also writing for Oriental Tales, Weird Tales‘ sister magazine. She would return to the desert for her classic “Werewolf of the Sahara” (Weird Tales, September 1936), which despite its Pulpy title is a first rate bit of werewolfery.
“The Dogs of Salem” by David H. Keller (Weird Tales, September 1928) is a story in the tradition of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, an ironical tale that has both a supernatural and non-supernatural explanation. Timothy Thomas is the local expert on witchcraft in Salem. He has two pretty daughters. When two cobblers, Amos and Andrew Canning, start to show too much attention to the girls, Thomas uses the witch hysteria to have the men accused of bearing the witch’s mark and turning into large black dogs and biting people.
They are arrested in church and put in jail. When the crowd comes to burn them, they are gone, replaced by two black dogs. To make matters worse, the brothers have left a damning letter saying their master, Asmodeus, has rescued them and no one should go into the forest to look for them. Thomas declares the dogs must be hung and burned.
After the burning, Thomas returns home to find his girls gone, his wealth stolen. Unknown to him, the local hangman moved to Pennsylvania with a fortune in gold, and two cobblers have settled in Quebec with the prettiest wives.
“The Hounds of Tindalos” by Frank Belknap Long (Weird Tales, March 1929) is another Cthulhu Mythos tale, perhaps suggested by Lovecraft’s earlier tale. The Hounds of Tindalos dwell in a dimension beyond time. Being angular in nature, they can pass through angles to get at their victims. They were created in the beginning when the original act of evil tainted life. They will pursue their victims relentlessly, leaving them in a puddle of blue pus, their heads removed and placed on their chest. The plot follows Chalmers who discovers them then suffers the dreaded result.
“’Beyond life there are’–his face grew ashen with terror–‘things that I cannot distinguish. They move slowly through angles. They have no bodies, and they move slowly through outrageous angles.’” (“The Hounds of Tindalos” by Frank Belknap Long)
Visually one of the most popular Mythos critters despite the fact that Long never really describes them. The Weird Tales artist, C. C. Senf doesn’t draw them either but many people have since.
“The Hound of Duncardin” by Arlton Eadie (Weird Tales, August 1930) has the narrator on a walking tour of Scotland. A couple bad choices and he finds himself up to his neck in a bog. A black dog appears and directs him to safety. The man follows the dog to Duncardin Castle, where by coincidence the owner is an old army buddy, now Sir Allan. The narrator finds warmth and food for the night. He tells of the dog that rescued him, describing it as a large deerhound. Sir Allan says it couldn’t be because the only dog like that around the estate had died eighteen months earlier
The next day the two men do a tour of the castle. The narrator learns about all the people living at the castle. There is beautiful Lady Annabel, Allan’s stepmother, and her son, and a Dr. Blair. Allan begs off because he has one of his fits, that he attributes to being gassed in the war despite the fact his father suffered from the same. The next day Allan is still unwell so the narrator goes fly-fishing with Dugald, one of the estate workers. Dugald tells him about Bruce, the old laird’s dog. It was so upset when its master died, pawing at his grave, that Lady Annabel had it put down. Dugald tells him if he sees the dog again, to come get him.
After a restless night, the narrator wakes to hear a dog pawing at his door. It is Bruce. The man gathers Dugald and they follow the dog to the grave site. The coffin is opened and a discovery is made. Lady Annabel shows up demanding what is going on. The narrator says he has solved Sir Ian’s death and Sir Allan’s illness. Arsenic. The body has not decomposed in the eighteen months it has sat in the grave. Annabel draws a gun and shoots at the men, then turns the gun on herself. Of the black dog, there is no sign.
You can’t get more Arthur Conan Doyle than a story set in Scotland. The plot reminds me a little of traditional ghost stories but the Mystery element is also Gothic in origin. Eadie was an English writer who wrote exclusively for Weird Tales, 1932-1939.
“The Dogs of Doctor Dwann” by Edmond Hamilton (Weird Tales, October 1932) has Jameson in the Adirondacks for a month of peace and quiet. The local store owner, Farliss, warns him about the two doctors, Dwann and Bowman, who have the place next door and their strange dog experiments. Dwann walks in on the conversation, laughs at Farliss and even offers Jameson a ride to his cabin. Dwann assures Jameson his experiments into animal behavior are quite ordinary and the locals exaggerate.
That night Jameson sees two dog heads in his high window. Examining the spot outside he finds human footprints. He follows the tracks into the woods, hearing dogs howling. He decides to hike over to Dwann’s to see the doctors. The howling grows closer. Soon he perceives shapes tracking him in the woods. He hears dog howls but sees human forms:
The four things were not dogs and neither were they men. They had the bodies of men, white and unclothed bodies. But on their shoulders were the heads of dogs! Pointed police-dog heads, with blazing eyes, white fangs and dark muzzles! man-bodies and dog-heads!
The beasts chase Jameson to Dwann’s door. The doctors lets him in then commands the dog-men to calm down. Jameson stumbles inside and the creatures follow. Dwann explains that the creatures are experiments that he and Bowman created secretly. Using Russian science they had attached dog heads to dead human bodies. He tells how four rival scientists had them thrown out for their ideas and practices. Jameson is horrified but agrees to stay the night as it is too dark to walk home.
Jameson wakes from a troubled sleep, hearing a voice calling for him. A human face appears only a foot from the floor:
“For the head of Jackson was not set on any human body but on the hairy body of a large dog! The neck was set on the dog’s shoulders so that the human head was upright. This was a reversal of the dog-men. Jackson and the other three were man-dogs, human heads upon dog bodies!
Jameson learns the truth. Dwann had only told him part-truths. Dwann and Bowman had not used dead bodies but those of Jackson, Willetts, Baletti and Smith, the scientists who had ruined them. Jackson wants to give Jameson a key so he can free the others and escape. This plan is thwarted when Bowman shoots the Jackson man-dog. Dwann and his accomplice grab Jameson and take him to the lab. They plan one last experiment and Jameson will be the test subject. Dwann explains as they strap him to the operating table, that there is a half ton of dynamite under the building. When they have finished, the two doctors will destroy all the evidence and their inhumans freaks.
But Dwann and Bowman have counted Jackson out too soon. The mortally wounded man-dog frees his brothers and the man-dogs attack the scientists. Jameson is helpless, watching the creatures leap with dog bodies but tear out throats with human teeth. Jackson frees Jameson and tells him to run. He has pulled the switch that will blow up the house in three minutes. Jameson runs and is thrown to the ground when the house of nightmare explodes.
Hamilton’s inspiration for this story is pretty obvious. The Brukhanenko and Chechulin experiments were real, done in 1929. For the rest, Hamilton draws from H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). The T. Wyatt Nelson illo, despite being well done, spoils all the surprises.
“The Black Hound of Death” by Robert E. Howard (Weird Tales, November 1936) is a story that has the best and worst of Howard’s fiction in it. Kirby Garfield is in the dark night, trying to warn a man of impending trouble. Richard Brent is a white man hiding in the swamp area known as Egypt, a kind of black man’s slum. Garfield is there to warn him that the savage black man, Tope Braxton, has escaped police custody and may be in Egypt. He comes across another black man, Jim Tike. Tike has had his body savaged as if by the claws of grizzly. Before he dies, Jim says it was a man armed with a weapon that did this terrible damage. A dark form comes out of the night and stabs Garfield in the shoulder then escapes.
Garfield abandons Tike’s body and heads to Brent’s, thinking he sees a torch but it goes out. Once at Brent’s the old man doesn’t believe him. His paranoia is so bad he chases Garfield off with a sawed-off shotgun. Garfield heads back to town but comes across Ashley, Brent’s hireling, and a woman, Brent’s niece, Gloria. She has come because her uncle had summoned her from New York by telegram. Ashley swears there is no way Brent could have sent it, having been holed up in the swamp. A mysterious laugh fills the night, “Dead men! dead men with torn throats! There will be dead men among the pines before dawn!” Ashley and Garfield shoot at the voice but they hear it fade away.
The three go straight to Brent’s cabin. Brent explains to his niece that the madman out there in the woods is Adam Grimm, his old partner. In Asia, the men had been trapped by religious fanatics and Brent had abandoned his friend. Later when Brent heard the man was back in the US, he had sought a refuge in the swamp. Again, old man Brent refuses to let Garfield in, accusing him of bearing the mark of the hound (the wound on his shoulder). Garfield leaves, only to see the house explode. He turns to do something but is struck from behind. When he wakes he finds his hands in chains. Tope Braxton has him and taunts him before he kills him. Garfield has no chance of escape. He gambles on superstition. He tells Tope there is a cross carved into one of the cuffs and he will haunt his killer to death. Tope gets the keys to look, and Garfield springs. The two men lock in a death struggle that ends with Tope dead.
Garfield goes back to the cabin. The explosions did not destroy the building, merely disabled the inhabitants. Inside Garfield can see Brent tied up, Miss Brent stripped naked ready for sacrifice. Adam Grimm, a dark figure, explains that the cultists of Erlik had used their magic and science to change him into a monster. His hands are claws, his face muzzled like a hound. Garfield sees him going to kill Brent and opens up with the two guns he took from Tope. He shoots the Hound of Erlik twelve times and still the dog-faced monster is able to crawl to Richard Brent and tear out his throat.
There is so much going on in this story. Two madmen, an ancient cult, a werewolf, etc. Howard may have meant this story for the new Shudder Pulps like Terror Tales which had sprung up in 1934. This was not the only Shudder Pulp reject to end up in Weird Tales. (Jack Williamson and Hugh Cave did the same.) The intense racism of the story is quite off-putting even beyond the use of the N-word. This story, like the even worse “Black Canaan” (Weird Tales, June 1936) make REH hard to read despite his break-neck pace. (I could have put this story in my piece on werewolves in Weird Tales but I felt it fights better here with all the other revenge throat-rending hounds.)
“Dead Dog” by Manly Wade Wellman (Weird Tales, August 1938) repeats the same basic plot as “The Phantom Wolfhound” except the setting is Africa. Wellman grew up in Uganda with his missionary parents. Because of this his authenticity is far better than most Pulpsters.
Captain Rodriguez kills the native chief, Kaflatala, owner of a large black dog called Ohondongela which means “Revenge”. On the day the chief is executed his pet dies too. Later the ghost of the beast appears outside the Portugese’s window. He writes for the priest, Father Labossier, to come and save him. The father tends to think the problem is more psychological than supernatural, being a fan of Mystery fiction. Rodriguez’s dreams of the dog getting closer and closer, this time ending with a scream, his body found with its throat ripped out.
“The Hound of Pedro” by Robert Bloch (Weird Tales, November 1938) has Black Pedro Dominguez come to a small Spanish village with his wizard and dog in tow. They have come to take the gold from the mine. They sacrifice virgins to their master, Satan. Don Manuel Digron comes with his men and kill the wizard and the dog.
“…The hound was silent, ghastly silent; it did not growl or bay, instead it turned and rose. On two hind legs it stood, in monstrous simulation of humanity; then it turned and raced up the stairs in frantic flight…”
Before the dog dies it speaks. Digron realizes that Black Pedro’s soul had been traded with the dog’s.
Not many details on shape-shifting are used here outside of the ritual which is used to transfer the soul and that the dog is killed with an ordinary sword. Robert Bloch wrote many tales for Weird Tales, a few which feature werewolves and shape-changers. This one is unusual because of its Spanish setting.
With “The Hound” by Fritz Leiber (Weird Tales, February 1942) we arrive at the ultimate destination, a truly modern tale of terror, which happens to be about a dog and life in the city during wartime. David Lashley is a rather sad employee in a city department store. He lives with his ailing parents and has an interest in another department store worker, Gertrude Rees. Lashley can’t escape the torment of a hound-like monster that haunts his life. He discusses it with a friend named Tom Goodsell. Goodsell expounds the author’s idea, that each environment creates its own monsters. No rural werewolves or vampires here. The city makes its own form of terror, a greasy, black stain of a hound feeding in the garbage. This thing follows him to work, eats his lunch, stains his bedding with black marks.
David takes Gertrude out to the movies and for a short time feels normal. When he goes to kiss her good night she transforms in his arms into a werewolf-like thing. Was it real? David doesn’t know.
The next day David walks off the job, rides the street car to the edge of town. He seeks to find if he left the city could he outstrip the monster? He ends up at a zoo, where he sees natural wolves, which fill him with delight. He also sees a wolf that isn’t natural. It is his hound, with glowing red eyes and terrible grin. He runs, but where to? If he returns to the city he is headed for the beast’s lair.
David has forgotten that this is the night of the black-out. House lights go out, businesses, every light fades. He is alone in the dark. He trips over curbs, walks into things until he is prostrate on the ground. The hound comes now to press its freezing cold fangs into his arm. A light comes on. A man sees the hound fleeing, taking David to a house to recoup. David’s mood lifts, for he knows the man saw the beast too. He can endure its terror, as long as he is not alone.
Fritz Leiber has created a masterpiece with this story. The plot if stripped of detail is pretty much Lovecraft’s “The Hound”. But the detail makes it an entirely different and more modern story. Leiber was a Lovecraft fan but he refused to write pastiche in a manner a century old as some did. Instead, he wanted to take the Lovecraftian concepts of cosmic horror and apply them to something new. This attitude shaped all his best works: Conjure Wife (1943), Our Lady of Darkness (1977) and a good number of other short stories. His new way of telling terror will influence many writers after him, perhaps the most obvious is Clive Barker’s “The Forbidden” (Fantasy Tales, Summer 1985) where his urban spirit is a creature of graffetti and sewer filth.
“Here, Daemos!” by August Derleth (Weird Tales, March 1942) will repeat the plot of Lovecraft’s “The Hound” but with a bit of an M. R. James feel to it. Martin Webly is the new vicar of the parish at Millham. He is saddled with a prior debt and figures to pay it off by taking the treasure from a famous grave. This belonged to the necromancer Sir Nicholas Millham. The wizard was said to have a black dog named Daemos, Greek for “Demon”. The grave has a curse laid upon it that warns of a guardian.
Webly ignores the local superstition, hiring workers from out of town. The grave gives up a chest of jewels that will pay the debt and further Webly’s ambitions in the church. After the invasion of the grave he sees a dark shadowy man with a large dog. Later a local shows him a portrait of Millham in a rare book. It is the man Webly saw outside his window. Still the vicar refuses to believe. Things start to go wrong. The bishop is angry over the robbing of the grave. Thatt night he hears someone call, “Here, Daemos! Here, Daemos!” before a giant black dog rips him apart. The locals return the jewels and place the curse back on the grave.
“The Fangs of Tsang-Lo” by Jim Kjelgaard (Weird Tales, November 1945). I’ve written about this story at length before, so I won’t repeat myself but refer you there. One of the all-time great dog writers spins a weird tale about a mutant dog.
“The Dog That Came Back” by Stanton A. Coblentz (Weird Tales, July 1947) is our final dog tale, written by a man better known for poetry and Science Fiction. Sanderson is telling a campfire story in his fashion. He tells of how he ended up buying the Porcupine’s Back farm. The property had once belonged to Peter Hardacre, a ruthless miser who was always accompanied by his sheepdog. The man and his dog mysteriously disappeared. The nephew sold the property quickly as had the next owner. Sanderson ended up with the property because of the low price and a wager.
Sanderson moves in, along with his wife and their dog, Flash, who has one blue-gray ringed eye and one white. The dog goes mad with barking and is always wanting to dig in one corner of the storeroom’s concrete. This goes on for awhile, the couple having to lock the dog out of the room.Having enough of it, Sanderson gets a pick-ax and digs up the spot. He finds a cigarette case with the initials Q. E. V., the skeleton of a dog (bearing a bullet wound in the skull) and the skeleton of a man, also shot. When the police hear of this, a stonemason named Vaile is arrested.
Vaile claims he gave the cigarette case as collateral on a loan. No one believes him because Hardacre had been such a penny-pincher. The cops bring Vaile to the farm, in the hopes that the scene of the crime will spark a confession. Vaile never sees the storeroom. Flash starts barking then plunges down the road to meet the car. It takes two cops to keep the dog off Vaile. The stonemason confesses, saying he killed Hardacre by accident then had to shoot the dog. He buried them under concrete to hide the evidence. Flash is overjoyed the day Vaile is sentenced to the penitentiary. Sanderson sees him licking the hand of someone who isn’t there. Sanderson says that is why they call him The Dog That Came Back.
Nothing new here, a more modern version of “The Hound of Duncardin” though Coblentz does it well. The elements from Poe are obvious as is the Mystery nature of the story.
