Black Shuck

This is my new countdown to Halloween post, it is about an old British folkloric creature: Black Shuck. I have learned about him first on All About Ghosts, a book I blogged about recently. The image you see on your left is from the book. As you can see, he is sometimes depicted as having one eye, which makes him all the more sinister. You can read more about Black Shuck here. He is a ghostly hound that often appears in British folklore and is one of the most famous. I find ghostly or devilish hounds the lost children of eerie folklore and horror stories. Werewolves, vampires, ghosts, heck even witches to some degree have showed up in modern horror fiction. Devilish hounds like Black Shuck? Well, The Hound of the Baskerville is famous, but he was rationalized in a crime fiction story and in the end he is nothing but a trained killing dog. But supernatural hounds in horror fiction, there are very little that I know of. Maybe ghostly hounds are too beastly to relate to (I mean you cannot have a conversation with them, unlike a lycanthrope in human form or a vampire), maybe they limit the narrative and plot possibilities. All the same, I'd like to have a crack at one of them, maybe Black Shuck himself.