The Hound is noteworthy as the first of Lovecraft’s works to feature the fabled Necronomicon, an ancient and forbidden text written by The Nameless City’s Abdul Alhazred. The Necronomicon crops up in many, many later Mythos stories. Inspired by H.P.L.’s inventiveness, other Weird Tales authors included the cursed volume in their own works, most notably Robert E. Howard in his 1931 story The Children of the Night. The Necronomicon also plays an important part in the famous Evil Dead movie trilogy.

Hound also contains one of Lovecraft’s most jaw-dropping uses of the language: the amulet stolen by the grave-robbing pair bears ‘the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng in Central Asia’. Leng is situated in the Antarctic in At the Mountains of Madness and proves to exist on another plane entirely in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927). The Hound was followed a year later by the minor chiller entitled The Festival, set in the fictional town of Kingsport, which Lovecraft first used in his 1920 story The Terrible Old Man. The events of The Festival are referred to in passing in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Up to this point, H.P.L. had produced five tales of terror with only tenuous connections to one another, and no indications of a greater theme. But everything changed with The Call of Cthulhu, which he outlined during his brief time in New York, but did not begin to write until after his return to Providence. This is the first story to establish The Old Ones, and their presence is felt throughout all the later Mythos chapters.

Mention is made within the story of Clark Ashton Smith, a fellow contributor to Weird Tales, whose talents also ran to poetry, sculpture and art – his paintings are discussed in At the Mountains of Madness. In his letters, Lovecraft addressed his colleague as ‘Klarkash-Ton’, a name he would later bestow upon an Atlantean high priest in The Whisperer in Darkness (1930). The character of the cultist Castro is probably named after Adolphe de Castro, an ‘amiable charlatan’ for whom Lovecraft ghosted several stories. The city of R’lyeh, in which Cthulhu is entombed, is referred to again in The Whisperer in Darkness, and explorers from the Miskatonic University uncover the story of Cthulhu’s arrival on Earth and the sinking of R’lyeh during At the Mountains of Madness (1931).

There was a strange and amusing incident following the publication of The Call of Cthulhu – the literary editor of the Providence Journal noted that Lovecraft had used his address in the story and threatened the author with a dire and monstrous revenge. Lovecraft’s lighthearted poem The Messenger is a response to that threat.

Astonishingly, Weird Tales originally turned down The Call of Cthulhu. This was not a reflection upon the quality of the story, since it was the editor Farnsworth Wright’s habit to reject a work upon its first submission, only to accept it at a later date. Thus, a year later, Wright asked to see the story again, and bought it for $165. Given the story’s tremendous scope and significance, Lovecraft’s passion for writing was severely dented by Wright’s original refusal, and thereafter his stories appeared with less frequency.