Elmer Brown Mason

Elmer Brown Mason (1877–1955) was an American writer. He studied at Yale for a period, but then transferred to Princeton, from which he graduated in 1903. Mason became an entomologist for the now-defunct Bureau of Entomology (USDA) in 1910. In addition, he was a seasoned world traveler. In 1915, his fantastic stories of scientists hunting rare species in the remote corners of the world started appearing. Of note were the five stories featuring swamp-guide, Wandering Smith, in "The Popular Magazine", especially "The Golden Anaconda"; and the variety of tales in "All-Story Weekly", highlighted by the horror-filled lost-race novelette "Black Butterflies," set in Borneo, and its sequel, "Red Tree-Frogs."
Mason was gassed in France during World War I, suffering permanent disabilities, which sidetracked his writing career. His globe-trotting ceased and his stories exchanged the fantastic for the domestic. His fiction writing career petered out around 1926.
He had a brief revival in 1949-50 in the pulp magazines, "Famous Fantastic Mysteries" and "Fantastic Novels", which reprinted four of his stories from "All-Story Weekly".
"Black Butterflies," was included in the anthology "Rainbow Fantasia: 35 Spectrumatic Tales of Wonder" ed. by Forrest J. Ackerman; Anne Hardin.