The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long

The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long Frank Belknap  Long was born in 1901 in Harlem, New York (not the Netherlands) and died in 1992 aged 92 in Manhattan. He was a horror and science fiction writer and is most famous for his contribution to the stories of the Cthulhu Mythos. The Cthulhu Mythos begins with H P Lovecraft, but many other authors have contributed towards the corpus of stories that the faithful call ‘The Canon’.   It was his 1921 story The Eye Above The Mantel that caught Lovecraft’s eye. That story was a pastiche of Edgar Allan Poe and I have elsewhere commented on that histrionic overblown prose that contains many screaming crazy dudes and occult blasphemous horrors which is found first and best in Poe, then Lovecraft and here in this lovely story. Frank and Howard maintained a long correspondence. Lovecraft was famous for his lengthy and multiple pen friendships as he sat shut up and nervous in his room. He became a mentor to Frank.  Frank contributed to the pulp magazines The Hounds of TindalosChalmers. Prefers illuminated manuscripts to adding machines and leering stone gargoyles to automobiles. Who doesn’t?  He has a long nose and slightly receding chin. His bookcase has medieval pamphlets about sorcery, witchcraft and black magic (surely triple tautology)  but again, what’s not normal in any of this? Although I think that Frank is setting it up for the norms so they get the idea that Chalmers is a bit weird.  He has the same name as the Australian Philosopher David Chalmers who famously came up with the term ‘the hard problem’ to describe how in a materialist way of thinking, matter can give rise to subjective experience. It’s as hard a problem as how cows make lollipops. We simply can’t figure either of them out. So, Frank is using ‘modern science’ in the guise of Einstein to undermine the self-confident materialists, particularly regarding time. He throws this is in like spice. He lets us know that Einstein is relative: we each have our own versio