Why I Love the Hound

Halloween is my favorite holiday.

For the past three years, I’ve read Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” in the weeks leading up to Halloween. Mina can be a real pill but it’s still wonderful descriptive horror writing.

This year I mixed it up and reread “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” The desolate moor is one of my alltime favorite settings. Holmes does some brilliant deductions, particularly the opening chapter with Dr. Mortimer.

But the Hound itself is a wonderful creation. A ferocious creature that rips out the throats of members of the cursed aristocratic clan of Baskervilles when they cross its path over the centuries. Just brillliant.

The foreword to the book talks about why this is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most popular story. The answer: It has the foundation of an engrossing, suspenseful mystery, with Holmes and Watson doing their usual bit of solving, and then it adds the Supernatural. I agree. The baying of the hound on the moor, its massive footprints, the killing of the poor convict it mistook for a Baskerville…I’ve read the story three times and seen four different movie or TV interpretations. But still, when I settle in with the Hound I get CHILLS.