The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle · 1900
The hound is real—but the curse is a lie Stapleton weaponises to inherit the Baskervilles. Holmes outsources to Watson, then secretly joins him on Dartmoor to expose a naturalist’s calculated murder. The book works because its dread is architectural: the moor, the hut, the portrait, and the phosphorus hound all serve the argument that terror is engineered, not inherited.
