Hunting Horror
Hunting-Horrors (AKA "Hunting Horrors", "Hunting Horrors of Leng") were inspired by a throw-away reference in H. P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (fiction) and a description in "August Derleth's "Lurker at the Threshold (fiction)".
Description
And in the air about him were great viperine creatures, which had curiously distorted heads, and grotesquely great clawed appendages, supporting themselves with ease by the aid of black rubbery wings of singularly monstrous dimensions.
— "August Derleth's "Lurker at the Threshold (fiction)"
Hunting Horrors, the hunting-beasts of Dreamlands horrors, resemble enormous twitching, squirming worms with one or more black, rubbery sail- or umbrella-like fins or wings. They are nocturnal and injured by light, and especially bright light can sear them into dust. Hunting Horrors serve as harriers for the god Nyarlathotep, and one of Nyarlathotep's avatars, The Haunter of the Dark, shares similar traits with the Hunting Horrors.
In the Mythos
Hunting Horrors were inspired by a throw-away reference in H. P. Lovecraft's 1926 novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (fiction) and a description in "August Derleth's short "posthumous collaboration" "Lurker at the Threshold (fiction)", developed further by Chaosium for the Call of Cthulhu (RPG).
As described by Lovecraft, the Horrors might actually be identical to the Larvae of the Other Gods:
Great polypous horrors slid darkly past, and unseen bat-wings beat multitudinous around him... shoals of shapeless lurkers and caperers in darkness, and vacuous herds of drifting entities that pawed and groped and groped and pawed; the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, that are like them blind and without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts.... Cries rent the aether as ribbons of light beat back the fiends from outside. And hoary Nodens raised a howl of triumph when Nyarlathotep, close on his quarry, stopped baffled by a glare that seared his formless hunting-horrors to grey dust....
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (fiction)
Associated Mythos Elements
- deity: Nyarlathotep
- deity: The Haunter of the Dark (Avatar of Nyarlathotep)
- location: Dreamlands
- race: see alternatively Larvae of the Other Gods
References
- fiction: H. P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (fiction) provides a throw-away reference to the name
- fiction: August Derleth's "Lurker at the Threshold (fiction)" provides a description
- sourcebook: H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands
- sourcebook: Malleus Monstrorum
