[1] Though his writing career spanned seven decades, he is best known for his horror and science fiction short stories, including contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos alongside his friend, H. P. Lovecraft.

As a boy he was fascinated by natural history, and wrote that he dreamed of running "away from home and explore the great rain forests of the Amazon."

[5] Samuel Loveman declared that Long's poem "The Marriage of Sir John de Mandeville" was worthy of Christopher Marlowe.

Long's closest friends (apart from H. P. Lovecraft) in this period included Samuel Loveman, H. Warner Munn, and James F. Morton.

[6] "The Horror from the Hills", a story serialised in 1931 in Weird Tales, incorporated almost verbatim a dream H. P. Lovecraft related to him (among other correspondents) in a letter.

The short novel was published many years later in separate book form by Arkham House in 1963, as The Horror from the Hills.

Long reportedly ghost-wrote two, possibly three, of the Ellery Queen Jr novels (mentioned in correspondence with August Derleth) but did not identify the titles.

[9] Long contributed several original scripts to this comic's early issues, as well as an adaptation of Walpole's The Castle of Otranto.

He worked in the 1940s as a script-reader for Twentieth Century Fox[5] Long wrote crime and weird menace stories for Ten Gang Mystery and other magazines.

Long credited Theodore Sturgeon, whom he met several times in the mid-1940s, as being instrumental in getting one of his middle-period stories, "A Guest in the House", produced on CBS-TV in 1954.

He was associate editor on Satellite Science Fiction, 1959; on Short Stories, 1959–60; and on Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine until 1966.

In 1972 Arkham House published The Rim of the Unknown, their second hardcover collection of Long's work - a volume focusing primarily on his science fiction short stories.

He and his wife lived in extreme poverty during the 1980s and 1990s in an apartment in Chelsea, Manhattan - a period documented in Peter Cannon's memoir Long Memories (1997)[citation needed].

Long, though confined to a wheelchair, was a Guest of Honour at the H. P. Lovecraft Centennial Conference in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1990, where he spoke on panels regarding his memories of his great friend and literary mentor.

Long died of pneumonia on January 3, 1994, at the age of 92 at Saint Vincent's Catholic Medical Center in Manhattan, after a seven-decade career as a writer and editor.

Friends and colleagues had his remains reinterred at New York City's Woodlawn Cemetery, in a family plot near that of Lovecraft's grandparents.

A graveside ceremony on November 3, 1995, was attended by such figures as Scott D. Briggs, Peter Cannon, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Ben P. Indick, S. T. Joshi, T.E.D.

On November 17, 1995, the actual interment of Long's body took place, an event witnessed by Peter Cannon, Ben P. Indick and S. T. Joshi.

Lovecraft found Long a stimulating correspondent especially in regard to his aesthetic tastes, focussing on the Italian Renaissance and French literature.

They saw each other with great frequency (especially during Lovecraft's Brooklyn residence in New York City from 1924 to 1926), at which time they were the chief members of the Kalem Club and wrote to each other often.

Long's short novel The Horror from the Hills (Weird Tales, Jan and Feb-March 1931; published in book from 1963) incorporates verbatim a letter by Lovecraft recounting his great 'Roman dream' of Hallow'een 1927.

A number of other works by Long can be considered as falling within the Cthulhu Mythos; these include "The Brain Eaters" and "The Malignant Invader", as well as such poems as "The Abominable Snowman" and "When Chaugnar Wakes".

They could only enter our reality via angles, where they would mangle and exsanguinate their victims, leaving behind only a "peculiar bluish pus or ichor" (Long).

The Hounds of Tindalos have been used or referenced by many later Mythos writers, including Ramsey Campbell, Lin Carter, Brian Lumley and Peter Cannon.

Cannon's story "The Letters of Halpin Chalmers", a direct sequel to "The Hounds of Tindalos", in which the main characters are thinly disguised versions of Frank and Lyda Long, appears in Robert Weinberg, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg, 100 Crooked Little Crime Stories (NY: Barnes and Noble, 1994).

Metallica (with their song "All Nightmare Long" from their ninth studio album Death Magnetic), Epoch of Unlight, Edith Byron's Group, Beowulf, Fireaxe,[15] and Univers Zero have all recorded tracks incorporating them.

Charles P. Mitchell has suggested that the "drone dog" in the film Phantoms, based on the novel by Dean R. Koontz, is reminiscent of a Hound of Tindalos.

[17][18][19][20] A Guest in the House (CBS-TV television play, 1954) Audio recording of author panel discussion from First World Fantasy Convention, Providence, 1975.