The Sea Stories of Frank Belknap Long form a short phase at the beginning of his career when he wrote largely for Weird Tales. FBL went through a similar spate of Egyptian inspired stories as well, along with the Lovecraftian stuff he is perhaps most famous for.
John Pelan wrote in “The Curious Career of Frank Belknap Long”, the introduction to Masters of the Weird Tale: Frank Belknap Long (2011):
…Terrors from the sea are present in several Long stories, and were he to have added even a few more tales of this sort to his output, it’s very likely that he would be ranked with William Hope Hodgson as a master of the oceanic horror story. While as yet no Long letters discussing Hodgson have been uncovered, it seems fairly clear that as much as Lovecraft (if not more so), Hodgson was a powerful influence on FBL’s early development. Not only does Long share Hodgson’s preoccupation with dread things rising from the ocean depths to wreak havoc—as is seen in “Second Night Out,” “The Sea Thing,” “The Horror in the Hold,”“The Ocean Leech,” and, of course, “Death Waters”—but he also demonstrates a keen aptitude for portraying the truly alien and unfathomable, as is shown in “The Hounds of Tindalos” and “In the Lair of the Space Monsters.”
Let’s have a look at his suggested tales and perhaps a few others. And let’s remember that William Hope Hodgson’s tales of the Sargasso Sea are the metric by which we are comparing these.
“Death Waters” (Weird Tales, December 1924) takes its inspiration from Rudyard Kipling, which is quite evident in the manner in which Long describes the characters. The plot is simple enough. A strange gentleman with a dead man in a coffin explains how the fellow died. And he did not. Both were bitten by poisonous snakes. The dead man, Byrne, sought a certain jungle pool with supposed health benefits. He forces a local black man to drink the water to see if it is corrupted. The black man drinks the water then takes his revenge, summoning every snake he can from the jungle. The two men battle the barrage of biting reptiles. Byrne dies but the narrator, who stood beside him and fought, does not.
“The Ocean Leech” (Weird Tales, January 1925) (reprinted Weird Tales, June 1937) has a man who is in charge of a ship watch as his men are devoured by a giant mollusk. Obviously inspired by Hodgson’s “A Tropical Horror” (The Grand Magazine, June 1905), it has a gruesome scene where the attacking slime monster tries to pull a man through the scuppers but he doesn’t fit. The corpse is brutally mangled. Later the slug comes for the officer in his room. He is saved when his man, Oscar, cuts him free. The entire time he was being eaten, he had a wonderful feeling of calm pleasure.
“The Ocean Leech” had the distinction of being plagiarized and republished in Weird Tales as “The Ocean Ogre” by Dana Carroll (Weird Tales, July 1937). The story reads as a paragraph by paragraph copy. Farnsworth Wright, obviously, didn’t recognize it after twelve years. Which is odd when you consider he reprinted “The Ocean Leech” the month before!
“The Sea Thing” (Weird Tales, December 1925) is the logue of the captain of The Octopus, a ship becalmed and ravaged by cholera. Things change when a small boat with a single man aboard appears. He has food and water to share. His name is Francis de la Vega (They call him de Vegie.) He is the only survivor of the Princess Clara out of San Francisco. All the other passengers died of fright or drinking salt water. De Vegie threw their bodies overboard since he didn’t care to share their company. De Vegie is good company too, though he looks odd with long finger nails.
The crew of The Octopus slowly begin to die off one by one. As the evidence piles up, the captain finds a book in his cabin describing a Francis de la Vega from centuries ago. Examining the corpses they find a weird sucker mark like a lamprey on the chest. The captain realizes de Vegie is actually a creature from the bottom of the ocean that feeds like a vampire. He and Tommy confront the creature, destroying it at the cost of Tommy’s life.
“The Horror in the Hold” (Weird Tales, February 1932) is only marginally a tale that belongs among these others. A Spaniard named Pedro de Castro sneaks aboard the Scourge of the Caribees, The Princess of Lubek, an English ship captained by Bartholew Mabbott. His plan is to detonate the gun powder in the hold and destroy it. Unfortunately he stumbles across several men and has to sword fight them all. After killing four men he meets “The Dragon of England” and dies in its jaws. Later we learn that a crocodile had been put in the hold to be taken back to show the queen. The tale reads more like a Robert E. Howard tale than one by FBL.
“The Black, Dead Thing” (Weird Tales, October 1933) is better known as “Second Night Out”. This tale is one of FBL’s most reprinted along with “A Visitor From Egypt”. I first encountered it in Alfred Hitchcock’s 12 Stories for Late at Night (1962).
The story begins with a traveler on a cruise ship who wanders onto the deck at night. There he encounters a bizarre occult presence that attempts to pull him into a neither world. He escapes, calls the pursuer. That man explains that this being shows up on the second night out from the shore. The last man who met the monkey-faced demon was killed by it. Going back to his room, the traveler sees the thing again, dressed in the dead man’s suit.
The inspiration for this tale may be the most famous of all cruise horror tales, “The Upper Berth” by F. Marion Crawford in The Broken Shaft: Unwin’s Annual for 1886. Long’s tale is a close second to this masterpiece and reprinted almost as often.
“The Brain-Eaters” (Weird Tales, June 1932) is a story Pelan passes on. (I have to believe he is aware of it.) I think it belongs though it begins to show his growing interest in Science Fiction as a part of his Horror tales. (This can be seen more fully developed in The Horror From the Hills (Weird Tales, January February-March 1931) and in later novels like Journey Into Darkness (1967.) The story involves a boat found with weird terrors in it. The finders are soon visited by the same terror, the Brain-Eaters, a race of bat-like creatures that live in another dimension under the sea. This is no Hodgsonian tale of tentacles and seed weed but a Lovecraftian one. Still, it is a sea story filled with horrors.
Pelan later suggests “Fisherman’s Luck” (Unknown, July 1940) as a story to be included with the above. I disagree. This tale, despite its gruesome illustration, is a muddled mix of comedy and horror that falls flat for me like most Unknown stories do. It’s meant to be a modern take on Fantasy but doesn’t satisfy either as something funny or amazing. A fisherman discovers the head of a dead Asian man then pulls girl from out of the past with his rod. The cops find the head and suspect him of murder but both head and girl disappear.
I much prefer his suggestion of “In the Lair of the Space Monsters” (Strange Tales, October 1932) which starts with a man in a submarine being crushed to death. The only survivor of the crew is plucked from the ruined vessel by a race of octopus-men. The story follows his escape. Again, a Science Fiction-like story that appeared in a Horror magazine. Very similar stuff would appear in Astounding by Raymond Z. Gallun and Paul Ernst. (A magazine Frank would write for too.)
The Sea Stories of Frank Belknap Long, as Pelan suggests, could have become a book though I doubt anyone would have taken much interest back in the 1930s or even 1940s. FBL was an unknown Pulpster writing in the style of another writer, one who had largely been forgotten after his death. In recent years, William Hope Hodgson has become a star of weird fiction so any such collection of Long’s would have had to wait until the Cthulhu Mythos and Hodgson’s stars had risen again. (Perhaps Pelan would like to match FBL’s stories with those of Philip Fisher, the other latter day Hodgson, to make a nice fat book?)
