The Hounds of Hell

The lonely moor, the hapless human being, the mournful blood-freezing howl that presages the approach of the dark beast, the great hound's appearance, black as sin, with eyes like hot coals and jaws slavering to close on the pulsing throat: as Michel Parry says, the scene strikes a primordial chord deep within our racial memory - as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle well knew, when he made this scene central to the ever-popular Hound of the Baskervilles. The perennial fascination of the terrible confrontation between hound and human is reflected in the sixteen excellent stories brought together here, stories of diverse dogs with but one thing in common: their bite is very much worse than their bark.

There are dogs in this collection that are creatures of pure evil, and there are dogs which are the terrible instrument of vengeance. There are dogs, too, whose loyalty survives the centuries, notably in the collection's most chilling tale, by that master of the occult, H. P. Lovecraft. Not all the tales are terrifying. Saki (H. H. Munro), for instance, deploys a wickedly satirical humour, and there's an element of pure magic in Fritz Leiber's tale. Again Agatha Christie's contribution has a decidedly Science Fiction connotation. It all adds up to a splendidly varied collection.