New on Librivox, a public domain reading of Frank Belknap Long’s “The Man with a Thousand Legs” (Weird Tales, August 1927 — warning: full-view header illustration is a plot-spoiler).

“… a completely unrepentant shocker from 1927 that calls itself ‘The Man with a Thousand Legs’ and lives 100 percent up to its title.” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1973)

“… that marvel of many viewpoints, ‘The Man with a Thousand Legs'” (Pulp Magazine Thrillers, 1998)

“… we must remember it was written in 1927, and is rather good SF for that period” (Luna Monthly, 1972)

A couple of years ago Dark Worlds Quarterly had a long appreciation and summary of the tale. The tale’s fragmentary pieced-together structure and its opening illustration (see that full heading after reading the tale) might seem at first glance to be bouncing off a reading of Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”. Although to Weird Tales readers it might have appeared that the February 1928 published “Cthulhu” was actually following Long, rather than other way around.

As Dark Worlds usefully points out there was a later slightly revised version of “The Man with a Thousand Legs” in Magazine Of Horror And Strange Stories (August 1963), which removed a few touches that made it sound dated in the early 1960s. Later it was included in the Arkham House collection of Long’s stories, The Rim of the Unknown (1972). Presumably that was the 1963 version.