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 …