In Lovecraft's Shadow: The Fiction of Frank Belknap Long

I’ve been in a little bit of a cosmic horror phase these last few months. I reread many of my favourite Lovecraft stories, and I wanted to expand to other contemporaries of Providence as well. I was lucky to recall an indy bookshop in my country, which specializes in fantasy, SF and horror, and even have their own publishing house. The book I’m talking about here comes from them, and it’s a really nice publication – I had bought a book with two Algernon Blackwood novellas from them before, and I’m eyeing a two-part collection of Robert Bloch stories they have out as well. Frank Belknap Long was an American author and student of H.P. Lovecraft – although, unlike his unfortunate teacher, he had the good fate of living a long and industrious life. Long expanded on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, adding his own unique spin to it, with new creatures and ideas. The book I read contained three short stories and a novella – The Hounds of Tindalos, The Space-Eaters, The Gateway to Eternity and The Horror from the Hills , respectively. Starting bluntly, I have to admit that, in my opinion, Long’s writing abilities are well bellow those of Lovecraft’s. I don’t want to accuse the man of anything but, he did write his stories for cheap pulp magazines, and that is quite evident. Long doesn’t have that deeply complex and atmospheric writing style that Lovecraft has, although he does try to imitate it. Like, even If I didn’t know it already, it would be very visible that these stories were destined for mass consumption, not for hardback publications with golden leaf edges. The prose alternates between extremely flowery to somewhat blunt. It doesn’t quite touch HPL’s prose. Despite all of this, where Long’s prose lucks, he makes it up with his ideas. It has been often said that Lovecraft was just the Father of modern cosmic horror, and that his (literary) children surpassed him, and I think that’s true here. From monsters that live and exist in the angles of reality, to ancient fetishes hiding hungry primordial gods, there are stuff in these stories that Lovecraft couldn’t even begin to imagine, and they put a solid brick in this construction called cosmic horror. The Hounds of Tindalos may be one of my favourite horror stories to date! So, If you are a Lovecraft fan and want to expand on similar types of stories, Long may be a good start.