Frank Belknap Long’s The Man With a Thousand Legs

Weird Tales Premiere

Frank Belknap Long‘s “The Man With a Thousand Legs” first appeared in Weird Tales, August 1927, where it received a wonderful illustration from Hugh Rankin. The story did not garner much comment in the letters of “The Eyrie” but it did tie for first place with “Satan’s Fiddle” by George Malcolm-Smith. I would not have thought much of it except I noticed that it appeared in both Donald A. Wolheim’s Avon Fantasy Reader #8 (1948) and again in Robert A. W. Lowdnes’s Magazine of Horror (August 1963). There had to be something special about this story for it to keep resurfacing.

Donald A Wollheim

Of the story DAW introduced it with:

Although more than twenty years have passed since The Man with a Thousand Legs appeared, we would venture to doubt that the plot has ever been repeated, or that anything quite like it for eeriness of conception will be found often today. In those early days, no formulae for fantasy had been beaten out, and a young writer such as Long could strike out in channels as such would simply not occur to today’s authors who generally find it easier to travel the well-worn plot ruts rather than strike out into imagination’s more uncharted regions.

Robert A. W. Lowdnes

Robert A. W. Lowdnes will repeat this refrain almost twenty years after Donald A. Wollheim in The Magazine of Horror:

…A year later, Farnsworth Wright bought the magazine, and in the first issue under his direction, readers found a story by a young man named Frank Belknap Long. Long continued to appear regularly and was a close friend of the master weird fictioneer of them all: H. P. Lovecraft. In this magazine, a unique opportunity was offered to all writers young and old, known and unknown; for while the editor Wright used many stories which followed the usual formulas of  pulp fiction, he was always open to manuscripts which defied the conformities. “The Man With a Thousand legs” first appeared in 1927; it was unique of the time, and nothing quite like it has been written since. Only a few elements of style in the opening, and an occasional passage later on, seemed in any way “dated” to us, when we re-read it, and the author welcomed the opportunity to make some revisions. Here, then, is a new version of a classic tale of horror that will never be old.

An Unusual Format

The story is an innovation for Long since it is told in chunks by different narrators. A psychologist, a novelist on vacation, a druggist, a lighthouse keeper, a manuscript found in a bottle from the monster, a salmon fisherman, a newspaper clipping, and a vagrant tell the story. “The Man With a Thousand Legs” is a novella so this switching of perspective can get a little tiresome but through it you perceive the real story. Taking a Lovecraftian trick, borrowed from the horror fiction of the Victorians, Long plays with the narrative structure, offering up different personalities that most Pulp stories would not have time or attention for.

The plot (seen through different incidents) begins with the disgraced scientist, Arthur St. Armand, a young lion of society with his discoveries around etheric waves. When Paul Rondoli disproves his theories, he falls into shadow. A psychologist gets a strange visit from the missing man, his body now thin and emaciated. Before St. Armand can explain what is wrong, he flees into the night.

New Narrators

We shift to the diary of Thomas Shiel, the writer, on holiday at the beach with his wife, Elsie. (This is a thinly disguised version of Long and his wife, Lyda, named after the horror writer, M. P. Shiel?)  They hear of a missing girl but don’t leave the hotel until they see the strange watery cave in the rocks. A local artist claims she was attacked by a tentacle from the hole but escaped by stomping on the limb. Later a man in a diving suit goes down into the water. He comes up in pieces.

Next it is Helen Bowan, a landlady who rents Arthur a room despite his strange appearance and behavior. He gets excited when he sees the room has a large bath. He orders salt to be delivered. The landlady hears weird gulping sounds. Later when bloody water drips from the ceiling, she throws him out. He flees willingly, complaining of rats. When he is gone Helen finds the bodies of the blood-drained vermin.

A Terrible Encounter

The statement of lighthouse keeper, Walter Noyes, is more revealing. When the man sees a large squid on the window of the lighthouse, he takes a pistol outside to deal with it. He shoots at the tentacles that try to grab him. He only stops when he hears a human voice telling him to cease. He sees Arthur, half man-half octopus. Arthur explains that he can no longer fully control his transformation from man to monster and back. He had fled into the sea to live as a beast but a passing boat has cut off six of his tentacles. He needs help but he can’t stop trying to devour Walter. The monster flees into the sea as the man fires shots at it. Walter had been reading his Arabian Nights, and he thinks of the story where a youth had the torso of man but legs of marble. (This is probably Long telling us where he got the idea from.)

A Strange Manuscript

Long now makes sure you can connect the dots. He has a manuscript in a bottle. It is St. Armand explaining everything that has happened up to now. Most of it is re-tread. The best parts are things we did not see before like when he explains his original experiments. He exposed a grasshopper to etheric rays, turning it to jelly. Later he does this to a small girl without any remorse. Then, unwisely, he exposes himself to the radiation. He tells how he can control the change with his mind, something the other two subjects could not. Despite this, whenever in octopus form, his hunger is all-consuming.

A Bloody End

The next segment is from a fisherman named William Gamwell. Gamwell and five others are witnesses to a strange scene in which two ships are attacked by a gigantic octopoid creature. The monster takes three cannon shots to the side before it pulls both vessels under. The ocean is filled with blood.

An article from The Long Island Gazette, tells of the body of twenty-five year old man found dead. Mr. E. Thomas Bogart, the coroner, mentions three wounds in his thigh with gunpowder residue. It is suspected his death was caused by foul play.

An Equally Odd Denouement

The final section is about a bum named Harry Olson. He is looking in garbage cans for food when he finds a strange little box filled with mirrors. (Shades of Clive Barker!) He steals the item and looks at it in private in a vacant lot. He places his hand under the etheric waves but has the strength of mind to reject changing. He destroys the box and declares himself the savior of humanity.

Inspiration

Despite DAW and RAWL’s kudos, the story does not strike me as something all that unusual. In fact, I know exactly what FBL’s models were: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885) and especially, H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897). In all the fiction descended from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the scientist (usually mad) creates a monster such as Adam, or The Colossal Beast or killer shrews, etc. What is different about Dr. Jekyll and Griffin (the Invisible Man’s actual surname), is they are both scientist and monster. The trick is done by having a mystery that the reader must wait to untangle, followed by a startling reveal.

I say The Invisible Man is especially an influence because the story has strong similarities. Griffin rents a room where he can work on his experiments to try and return to visibility. It doesn’t work out well, with the Invisible Man going on a rampage in the local public. Arthur St. Armand has a landlady too, and a similar disagreement. Another item of this sort is the bum at the end of the story. H. G. Wells had Thomas Marvel, a tramp, who becomes Griffin’s unwilling assistant. Long moves the hobo to the end. The attack of the monster on the ships feels like the tripod river attack in The War of the Worlds.

At the Drive-In

I’m not surprised that DAW in 1948 claims it is an unused plot but by 1965 there were several films that followed this pattern. A typical case is The Fly (1958) with its scientist who has had an accident and becomes a fly-human hybrid. There is an attempt to hide the reality until startlingly revealed. There is no return to human form and the film ends on a bummer, and with sequels and remakes. The Campus Monster (1958) is another, less successful, example. For a real innovator, Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man (1956) has the hero changed physically but he never gives up his humanity, telling a very different kind of story.

Long attempts to do a Hyde-style mystery-and-reveal but it doesn’t work too well. And let’s be honest, the average reader of  2021 is very familiar with this trick. It is hard to pull off, and it has only gotten harder and harder since Hyde strolled through London, thrashing noblemen with walking sticks. Robert Louis Stevenson was in a unique position to pull off this trick that no one, including Wells, ever had again.

No Cthulhu Need Apply

FBL included the story in his 1972 collection, The Rim of the Unknown (Arkham House). “The Man With the Thousand Legs” is the oldest entry and the only one from Weird Tales. The majority of contents comes from Astounding Science-Fiction and Fantastic Universe. Clearly Frank thought of this as an SF collection, not a horror collection. “The Man With the Thousand Legs” is by virtue of this fact, a Science Fiction story in the author’s mind. The lack of Lovecraftian elements steers things away from a Cthulhu Mythos tale (though the ship attack does ring a little of the third chapter Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” called “The Madness From the Sea” which Long would have read in 1926 before magazine publication.)

Octaman

There is still one last connection to this story that I have to mention. The 1971 film, Octaman, with its terrible octopus man of the title. The suit was created by Rick Baker (who was told no one would ever see it directly). The plot is pretty standard stuff with radiation mutating an octopus into a man-like thing. I doubt any of Frank Belknap Long’s story was ever seen by the producers but the similarity is there. This is as close to an adaptation we will ever see.

Conclusion

In the pages of Weird Tales in 1927, “The Man With a Thousand Legs” is unusual and of note. For FBL, the narrative structure is different and new. The desire to make it a Science Fiction tale as much as a horror tale is not unusual for FBL, for even his Mythos classics like “The Horror From the Hills” has plenty of SF paraphernalia. I am surprised that DAW and RAWL gush over it so much, but they are right to select and praise the work of Frank Belknap Long. Long is so often under-appreciated, largely because he sits in H. P. Lovecraft’s shadow.

Unlike Lovecraft, Frank was not satisfied to just write pseudo-Victorian style horror. HPL did use SF elements in some of his best stories but at heart he wanted to frighten with a weird tale. Frank certainly did that with his early work but even here is 1927 we can see him stretching. Later in his career he would write true SF for F. Orlin Tremaine and John W. Campbell. That transition may have begun with “The Man With a Thousand Legs”.