M. L. Humphreys appears to be one of the many obscure writers who worked briefly in the pulps. Or perhaps the name is a pseudonym, used once and discarded. Nothing could be found about this author beyond the fact that this story, the only one with this byline, was selected by H. P. Lovecraft in 1929 and 1930, when he compiled a list of significant horror stories, incorporating both literary fiction and popular stories. The list was published as H. P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Weird Tales: The Roots of Modern Horror, and the criterion for being included was that the stories must have “the greatest amount of truly cosmic horror and macabre convincingness.”