Normally, when looking into such matters, Lovecraft’s letters are a great asset.

Although reprinted twice during his lifetime in anthologies, like “Mother of Serpents” (1936) by Robert Bloch this story has never been published in any Cthulhu Mythos collection, and remains absent from Long’s The Early Long and Arkham House anthologies. Looking at Long’s memoirs, and the collections of his fiction, one gets the impression that perhaps Long wished it would be forgotten. What most compilers of Mythos stories seem to forget is that the first published story with a Mythos connection by Long was actually his third story professionally published: “The Were-Snake” ( Weird Tales September 1925). Lovecraft himself, and predate anything written specifically incorporating references to the Mythos by Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. These stories have been enshrined in canon as much as anything written by anyone other than H.

To hear Long tell it, his first contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos -and the first stories written as part of the Mythos, outside of Lovecraft’s own pen-were “The Space Eaters” ( Weird Tales July 1928) and “The Hounds of Tindalos” ( Weird Tales March 1929). Frank Belknap Long, Jr., Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside 23-24 I also contributed one scenic vista, the mysterious, perpetually mist-shrouded Plateau of Leng, and one forbidden book, John Dee’s English translation of The Necronomicon, which I placed at the head of The Space Eaters when that story first appeared in Weird Tales My contributions to the Mythos were of assorted shapes and sizes, ranging from the tiny, flesh-devouring Doels, who inhabited an alien dimension shrouded in night and chaos, to the monstrous Chaugnar Faugn, whom only the suicidally inclined would have mistaken for a pachyderm.

The Ocean Leech by Frank Belknap Long