A. Merritt (1884–1943)

2/5

Going into The Face in the Abyss, the two pieces of context I had were that: One) Merritt was an inspiration to some of the weird fiction guys (Lovecraft among them) and, two) that Merritt is known as having some of the most purple prose among his contemporaries, both things that I agree with upon finishing the novel.

The Face in the Abyss starts out as a more standard pulpy adventure story of four morally corrupt Americans in the Andes trying to find lost Incan artifacts, but abruptly show more progresses (because it's a fix-up novel with a very visible seam) into a lost race story with dinosaurs, demigods, and human-animal hybrids. The ancient lost race that our main character discovers came to Earth untold millennia ago, possessing extremely advanced technologies that allowed them to prevent aging and death. It's a fantasy story that has the trimmings of science fiction, though I think that anybody reading it with the expectation of anything science fiction related will be sorely disappointed. The main plot revolves around a cliche battle between good and evil, as differing ideologies amongst the few remaining members of race creates tension and conflict.

This all being said, most of the The Face in the Abyss is wrapped up in the long-winded descriptions of the settings that the main character passes through. Merritt LOVES to expound on the visual qualities of light shafts, rock faces, jewels, banisters, pendants, pools, passageways, etc. My critique here is not that adorned writing can't be good, or that spending time on the visuals isn't valuable, but Merritt spends so much time doing it that it gets in the way of any decent pacing, character work, or theme exploration. There simply isn't space for much else other than the purple writing. It feels dated in many ways, and took forever to force my way through writing that felt like trying to run through a pool of honey.

There were a few passages where Merritt proves himself capable of writing something of higher quality, specifically I'm think of the first encounter with THE face in THE abyss, and the first encounter with the aptly named "Lord of Evil". Unfortunately these passages are the exception to the rule. Visuals alone, while they might be particularly good ones, aren't enough to carry a novel.

This is certainly not Merritt's most acclaimed work, so at some point I'll have to at least return to read The Moon Pool to see if it is marginally more readable. show less

This is another expedition into the past of popular literature. Abraham Merritt, whose byline is nearly always A. Merritt, was a popular author who wasn’t even best known in his own time for his fiction. Rather, he was a celebrity journalist, making enough money to travel widely and pursue arcane hobbies.

The Moon Pool is the work I usually see cited as typical of Merritt’s work, and it is listed in Gary Gygax’s “Appendix N” as an influence on Dungeons and Dragons. Let’s dive show more into the Moon Pool and see what happens!

The Moon Pool is a lush work of prose. It isn’t quite my style, but I am reminded of something that the late Jerry Pournelle said about Ivanhoe; the point of the long descriptions was to transport people to places they had never been, in a era when you couldn’t immediately find an image of any place you wanted to see. Photography was well established in the 1920s, so that was perhaps less important than in Sir Walter Scott’s day, but nonetheless most of the audience of Merritt’s stories probably had never traveled far from their homes or seen the broad range of environments that Merritt had.

Whenever I delve into a work of this era, it almost always takes me a while to get into the groove with the prose, and not just because of the aforementioned verbose style. With popular works like this, I find that the word choice, phrasing, and background assumptions are just different enough to throw me off. The worst example of this was King – of the Khyber Rifles, Talbot Mundy’s 1916 adventure, which almost lost me in some early dialogue. Since I find the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica perfectly comprehensible, it clearly has something to do with how formal, academic language changes more slowly than everyday speech.

A stylistic choice I appreciated was that while Merritt did include some amount of science fantasy in the story, the detailed descriptions of the fantastic technologies had been redacted so as not to provide too much information to the Russians. In this way, 1919 was sufficiently like 2020 to help me connect with the story.

The Moon Pool as a story is a lost world adventure, inspired by the monumental ruins of Nan Madol in the South Pacific, which also inspired Lovecraft’s lost city of Ryloth. Merritt’s description of the South Pacific is evocative, and I enjoyed his ability to accurately describe the vast numbers of unusual people who populated the tramp steamers of the day. Out of that itinerant population, Goodwin, the narrator, assembles a band of adventurers [here is where I really see the D&D influence] as he seeks to rescue his friend Throckmartin from the Dweller in the Moon Pool.

The mix in this pulp classic is a little different, as no one knew or cared about the genres we are used to almost 100 years later. There is some cosmic horror, some science fantasy, some romance, and some political intrigue. Merritt pulls all this together into one grand adventure that is very much worth the price of entry. With Hollow Earth style stories like this I find it a bit harder to generate the needed suspension of disbelief, but I also know that this is a time-bound phenomenon, as nothing ages faster than science fiction [even when it is really good]. I’ve read Campbellian scifi from the 50s that was more unbelievable to me, and I know that some of my favorite books now will probably seem a little odd 100 years from now, so I suggest that the effort needed to see someone else’s favorite story with new eyes is worth the effort.

One of the things that got me into reading pulp classics like The Moon Pool was an interest in seeing popular literature from an age where Christian belief was taken for granted, along with an interest in seeing the fictional influences of Dungeons and Dragons in a new light.. C. L. Moore’s short stories in particular struck me as being explicitly Christian, along with Poul Anderson’s works, but The Moon Pool was almost a little scandalous.

At this point I intend to move into spoiler territory, so if you care about spoilers in a 100 year old book, you should skip this part.

What I mean by this is that early on in the book, one of the merry band of adventurers assembled by Goodwin is moved to abandon his Christian beliefs when the Dweller in the Moon Pool steals his wife and daughter. Olaf Huldricksson apostatizes in favor of the warlike gods of his ancestors when a horror from the deep kidnaps his family. I was honestly a little shocked, but it is all comprehensible to me. Merritt’s work is just a little different than Three Hearts and Three Lions, where the mere name of Jesus is enough to send wicked things reeling.

When that doesn’t work for Huldricksson, he turns to Thor instead. I honestly have no idea whether that would have been scandalous to his audience, but it was scandalous to me. However, at the end, Huldricksson gets his revenge, but perishes in the attempt, bringing to mind Matthew 26:52 “Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its sheath, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” And then I wasn’t so sure.

That unexpected complexity is exactly what I came for, and I am happy that I found it. While the The Moon Pool is very much not in the modern style, it is a great read, and worth a look if you’ve never had a chance. show less

A lost world fantasy, reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Arthur Conan Doyle (The Lost World), featuring dinosaur survivals in a remote area of Peru, cut off from contact with the outside world, but with an early genetic engineering vibe - a race who originated in the South Pole before a polar shift made that area uninhabitable have somehow banished death (while at the same time making it impossible to have children, in order to keep their numbers in check), and have manipulated others show more into particular physical types such as humanoid spiders called Weavers.

The protagonist stumbles upon this remnant of an advanced civilisation as part of an expedition looking for fabled riches. He falls out with the expedition leader when the latter assaults a young woman who originates from the hidden race. She later returns to lead them to the riches the other expedition members crave, though the protagonist cares only for her welfare, having instantly fallen in love with her. The riches then turn out to be a form of judgement. After that, the story takes a different turn as the hero becomes entangled with an imminent civil war between factions in the lost world, the apparent good guys being led by an apparent human-reptilian hybrid, the Snake Mother, who may be less human than she leads him to perceive.

The story concentrates on action, but flags in places, and has very little character development. The protagonist and his would-be girlfriend are particularly cardboard. The book has elements which later would become fantasy tropes such as a dark lord (it was published in 1931, apparently based on magazine stories dating from the 1920s). In some ways it better fits the label of science fantasy, as the various ray-weapons etc are, we're told by the Snake Mother, all products of the former civilisation of which she is the only direct member, and not magical. Obviously it cannot avoid being dated by today's viewpoints, though, to the author's credit, manages to avoid racism in relation to the Native Americans who form the labour force and are the spear carriers in the armies of the various factions. But it rather loses impetus by the end and fizzles out, and has rather too rambling a plotline to always hold interest, hence only 2 stars for me. show less

This is a far superior as a fantasy novel to the 'Moon Pool', published only a year before and reviewed by us at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/757612879. The main protagonist is the same Dr. Goodwin, explorer and scientist.

It still has the occasional lapse into archaic and weird syntax that marred the earlier work but, in other regards, what were weaknesses in his earlier work are now restrained and turned into strengths. The book is certainly helped by not being a 'fix' of pre-set show more short stories.

The work is recognisably Merritt in so many ways. Perhaps most difficult for the modern reader is the almost synaesthetic attempt to evoke strange states or realms.

The truth is that his effort requires one to be in a half-sleep, perhaps drugged or hypnogogic state, which is where (one supposes) he took part of his inspiration. Because reading a text involves the rational process of stringing words together in order to create sense the effect is not what he may have hoped for or intended.

We can only get close to what he meant to evoke at these moments (such as the journey into the metal monster's city) if we invest serious effort into almost becoming the language, perhaps re-reading it over again for the context and then trying to reproduce his own imagination in our own minds.

Given that the essence of the story is one of Rider Haggard adventurism combined with a science fiction premise close to one that might have been developed by Olaf Stapledon or Lovecraft there is too much of a disconnect here for such sections to work wholly well.

The effort is worthy but it falls between stools - confusing an adventure story with high strangeness yet not making the high strangeness the basis for some advanced poetic experiment.

Nevertheless, it is a masterpiece of the fantasy genre. It hangs together as an adventure story at a time when it was possible still to think that mysteries could be found in lands still hardly known to the readers and in a culture where Blavatsky's visions were still current.

One of his key early stories was placed in the far beyond of the North American wilderness. The Moon Pool was set amongst unknown Pacific Isles. This one is set in Central Asia near Tibet. Later he would move his imagination to the South American jungle.

This, with GPS and Google Earth, is scarcely possible today. Even near space has been lost to us as fantasy territory. Antarctica was closed off somewhere between the 'Mountains of Madness' and the myth of Nazi UFOs.

Merritt's next novel would presage this crisis of possibility by shifting into magical past time through a mirror, just as he had his hero move into magical orientalism in his rather beautiful early short story 'Through The Dragon Glass'.

His genius lies in his ability to take what many men dream between wake and sleep and fix it as a sustained narrative and then to weave themes that are clearly of great personal imaginative importance to him into an adventure that genuinely enthralls.

He is a man of his time. The final battle within the metal monster is the battle of a man who has read Milton - a struggle, though, that is closer to Zoroastrian or Manichean myth than anything Christian.

He writes within two years of a horrendous war in Europe and it has clearly marked him (as it does in other stories). The warfare of the metal monster is war as he imagines that it would be experienced as mechanical death-dealing on human flesh.

The sexual mores are also of his time. One of the hall marks of Merritt is an eroticism that is both pulpish and powerful.

There is, of course, the solid all-American girl 'type', the good girl, all spirit but clearly answerable to her brother and to her thoroughly masculine and rather uninteresting soldierly lover whose machismo ways result in little more than a sigh from the modern reader.

As foil, there is the magnificent Norhala, half Persian princess and half metallic and of the stars. She is a goddess in her cold superiority of passion and, although Sekhmet is not named (though other goddesses are), she is Sekhmet incarnate in her waging of war.

The sexual frisson comes from her 'glamour' which mesmerises the good girl adventurer Ruth into what one can only interpret as a full-on dreamy lesbian relationship.

Ruth's descent or ascent (depending on the stance of the reader) into a lost tranquillity away from conformity and duty is symbolised at her rescue by her single bare breast, that of Diana, and her near nakedness that, brought to her senses, she hides and then abandons without embarrassment for the sensible clothes of an explorer.

There is adventure in far away lands, a lost civilisation, creatures beyond time and space and, clearly, beyond our full comprehension, mysteries explained as science, bloody warfare, mesmeric altered states (Merritt undoubtedly had an interest in mind-bending drugs), courageous masculinity and the carefully managed high eroticism centred on idealised women. What more could a man want.

His tales were justifiably substantial sellers, helping to drive Argosy pulp sales in the 1920s and 1930s, and the lost masculinity of their milieu is why they are still engaging today. His books are about dream states and his book has become a dream state. show less