Frank Belknap Long started his literary career as a teenager in the 1920s by drawing on his deep appreciation for Edgar Allan Poe ; his initial work brought him into the sphere of H. P. Lovecraft , who became a friend and strong influence—so strong, that Long’s short story “The Hounds of Tindalos” was the first story not by Lovecraft’s to be part of the Cthulhu Mythos.

By the end of the 1930s Long had turned his hand to science fiction, and this became his primary genre for most of the rest of his long career as a regular in pulp magazines like Weird Tales , Comet , Planet Stories , and Fantastic Universe . While many of his contemporaries moved towards “harder” science fiction, Long’s work focuses on human psychology, often with a streak of the horror of his earlier writing coming through in the loneliness and alien nature of the space travel and worlds featured in his stories.

The short stories in this collection are those currently known to have passed into the U.S. public domain, arranged in order of publication.