Descend into the howling darkness of Robert E. Howard’s imagination, where ancient evils lurk in the blood and the beast waits for its inheritance. Read this classic of supernatural horror online for free.
Published in 1936, the year of Robert E. Howard’s suicide, The Black Hound of Death represents the Conan creator at his most elemental. Howard is remembered as the father of sword-and-sorcery, the poet of barbarism, the chronicler of Hyborian adventures. But he was also a master of the weird tale, a direct inheritor of Poe and Lovecraft, a writer who understood that horror is not supernatural—it is hereditary.
The story is set in the misty valleys of East Tennessee, where Howard’s own people had lived for generations. An unnamed narrator, a city-dweller returning to his ancestral home, hears rumors of a beast that haunts the dark woods—a great black hound, larger than any natural dog, silent as smoke, appearing only to those marked for death. He dismisses the tales as peasant superstition. Then he learns of the curse that has followed his family since the Crusades, the pact made in blood, the debt that comes due every century. And the hound is patient.
On this page, you can experience Howard at his most personal and most terrifying. We offer the complete 1936 tale for online reading.
Book Info
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Title | The Black Hound of Death |
| Author | Robert E. Howard |
| Year of Publication | 1936 |
| Genre | Weird Fiction, Horror, Southern Gothic |
| Language | English |
| Legal Status | Public Domain in the U.S. |
| Format | Online Reading |
Read The Black Hound of Death Online
Hear the padding of claws on the cabin porch. Begin this masterpiece of regional horror by entering the Cumberland foothills interactively below.
This preview introduces the skeptical narrator and the tales of the beast. However, the full, harrowing narrative—the Crusader’s pact, the blood inheritance, the night of the hunt, and the final, silent confrontation—is available in the complete text for our subscribers.
A subscription unlocks this essential work of American weird fiction and the complete horror tales of Robert E. Howard. Discover the darkness that haunted the man from Cross Plains.
About the Story The Black Hound of Death
Robert E. Howard wrote The Black Hound of Death in the shadow of his own death. He was twenty-nine years old, living with his mother in Cross Plains, Texas, writing at a furious pace to support them both. His mother was dying. His own psychological state was fragile. He had created Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane—heroes of action and violence—but his finest horror fiction is about helplessness, inheritance, the inescapable past.
The Family Curse
The narrator of The Black Hound discovers that the beast does not hunt randomly. It hunts his bloodline. A Crusader ancestor, Sir Richard de Bohun, made a pact with a Saracen sorcerer, trading his soul for victory. The sorcerer cursed him: his line would endure, but every generation would face the hound. The curse is not punishment for sin; it is the fulfillment of contract. Howard, the son of a country doctor, the grandson of pioneers, understood the weight of ancestry. You do not choose your blood; you answer for it.
The Appalachian Setting
Howard sets his story not in Transylvania or New England but in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee. This is not Gothic tourism; it is home. He describes the misty hollows, the remote cabins, the insular communities with the authority of a native informant. The hound is not an invader from some exotic realm; it is indigenous, rooted, as ancient as the hills themselves. This localization of horror—the recognition that the darkest forces are not imported but homegrown—was Howard’s distinctive contribution to the weird tradition.
The Black Hound
Howard’s hound is not a pet or a familiar; it is an elemental. It is larger than a wolf, blacker than shadow, silent in motion. It does not attack in the manner of a natural beast; it appears, and those who see it die. The hound is death itself, given form and appetite. Howard describes it sparingly, suggesting rather than displaying. The beast is most terrifying when it is absent, merely rumored, a shape glimpsed at the edge of firelight.
The Crusader’s Sin
The story reaches back to the Crusades, Howard’s favorite historical playground. Sir Richard de Bohun is a knight of the old stamp—brave, ruthless, devout. He makes his pact not with Satan but with a “infidel” sorcerer, trading his soul for victory over Saladin’s armies. The sin is not atheism but syncretism, the mingling of Christian and Saracen. Howard, the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, understood the danger of mixing blood and faith. The curse is miscegenation rendered as theology.
Modernity and Superstition
The narrator begins as a skeptic. He has left the hills for the city, exchanged superstition for science, replaced faith with reason. He returns to his ancestral home confident that the old tales are just tales. The story chronicles his gradual, reluctant conversion. The hound does not argue; it appears. Reason is no defense against the beast. Howard, who read Darwin and Nietzsche, who rejected the Christianity of his fathers, nonetheless believed in the old powers. They were not illusions. They were facts.
The Doomed Bloodline
The narrator survives the hound—barely. But survival is not escape. He learns that the curse continues, that his own children will face the beast, that the pact will never be broken until the line is extinguished. This is Howard’s darkest insight: some debts cannot be paid. Some sins are transmitted, not redeemed. The blood remembers.
Why Read the Story The Black Hound of Death Today?
Because it is the pure essence of Robert E. Howard, distilled and uncut. No Conan, no Thoth-Amon, no serpent-men of Valusia—just a man, his ancestors, and the beast that waits. Howard wrote this story knowing he would not live to see old age. He wrote it knowing that his own blood carried burdens he could not name. He wrote it, perhaps, as a kind of exorcism. It did not work. But the story remains, as dark and patient as the hound itself.
FAQ
Is this a Conan story?
No. Conan appears in many of Howard’s stories, but this is a work of contemporary horror, set in the author’s own time and place. It belongs to his “weird fiction” category, alongside “Pigeons from Hell” and “The Horror from the Mound.”
Was Robert E. Howard from Tennessee?
No, he was from Texas. But his mother’s family, the Hailes, were of East Tennessee stock, and Howard spent time in the region as a child. The landscape of The Black Hound is the landscape of his maternal inheritance.
Is this story connected to The Hound of the Baskervilles?
Only generically. Howard was certainly familiar with Conan Doyle’s famous hound, but his beast is not a mortal dog; it is a supernatural entity, a curse made flesh. The resemblance is superficial; the substance is Howard’s own.
How long is it?
Approximately thirty pages in standard editions. It is a substantial short story, long enough to develop its atmosphere and its genealogy, short enough to read in an hour.
Can I read it on my phone?
Yes. Howard’s prose is muscular and fast-paced, his sentences short, his paragraphs urgent. It reads quickly, almost compulsively. You will finish it before you are ready to stop.