The Hound of the Baskervilles is an excellent story which is fascinating for many reasons. In this post, I’d like to consider the moor itself. The moor has two rather distinct natures, despite being the same place. During the day it is safe and even cheerful. At night, it is a place of unknown dangers. This is highlighted in the colorful advice to “avoid the moor in those hours of darkness when the powers of evil are exalted.”

This dual nature of the moor served several functions. One of them was to create a rhythm which alternated investigation with danger. This allowed the excellent narrative structure of punctuated progress in trying to solve the mystery racing against a danger where one doesn’t know the progress the danger is making. This was excellent for creating an exciting atmosphere.

I think that another important thing that the dual nature of the moor does is to provide a background explanation as to why anyone is here at all. This is kind of an issue with the D&D setting Ravenloft, at least as it seems to me from descriptions of it without ever having played it. A land that’s all darkness and evil is one that everyone would leave if they don’t simply die first, and so there would be no one left for the evil to be parasitic on. And evil is always parasitic; what makes it evil is that it can only destroy, it can’t produce anything itself. (This is why the orcs in Tolkien couldn’t reproduce themselves and had to be made by others in order to be evil by nature.)

If the moor were always death to be on, no one would have their homes here. If there were no homes there, there would be no innocent people for Stapleton to hide among. For that matter, there would be no Sir Charles Baskerville for Stapleton to send his hound after.

The story is only interesting because the moor is dangerous at night, but it’s only possible because the moor is safe during the day. And, if you think about it for a moment, you’ll also realize that the danger of the moor at night would have been far less interesting without the safety of the moor during the day.

There’s a lesson in this for writers. One should not get so distracted by the most interesting part of a story so that one forgets the less interesting (and harder) parts of the story that make it possible. Without the parts that make it possible, it won’t even be interesting.