A. Merritt (1884–1943)

Many will already know the much-anthologised short fantasy story by Merritt called 'The Moon Pool'. This is its extension into his first full length 'pulp' novel.

The short story took us to the point where we felt the mystery of what is later revealed as the Shining One or the Dweller. Once again, as so often with Merritt, we get pre-emptive shades of H.P. Lovecraft.

Merritt writes at a peculiar point in fantasy history where the half-educated reader might reasonably dream of the reality of show more lost worlds in still scarcely explored territories.

It was a period when science could be happily mangled into speculative fiction that could still thrill but which is much less plausible as science to the more modern reader.

The full length novel is less interesting precisely because Merritt has to stop being merely suggestive and give us tale which bamboozles us with a dated mix of outmoded science and anthropology.

Once the details of the world of the Moon Pool are filled in, the magic starts to disappear despite the evident good and evil luscious lovelies and the chaste yet erotic sexual sub-plots that evoke pulp covers.

Understanding is also not helped by archaic language and sentence construction and mental images that suggest the world of Flash Gordon and Dale Arden.

Finally, a propensity to over-egg the sensory pudding with detailed pseudo-synaesthetic description weakens what could have been a powerful narrative, one that might have matched Stapledon for cosmic strangeness.

What we have in the end is an imaginative tour de force but one that is over-written and over-acted with too little narrative clarity and too much local colour. The mystery disappears under the weight of it all. 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

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

When a book has a chapter titled "Yolara, Priestess of the Shining One", it isn't generally a good sign. When it crams three or more adjectives into almost every sentence and delights in words like "supernal", you may well be wary. But, in the case of THE MOON POOL, you would be mistaken. In the hands of A. Merritt, you don't have time to dwell on stuff like that. Instead you are held in thrall by a strange narrative that combines Edgar Rice Burroughs' science fiction, a bit of Robert E. show more Howard, and a dash of H.P. Lovecraft. But even in such company, Merritt achieves an effect quite his own. Despite the florid passages, of which there are many, he still succeeds in doing more showing than telling. Your brain will strain at the images he fills it with of a strange world below the surface of a Pacific Island, inhabited by an ancient race and by a creation gone terribly wrong--the Shining One.

The heroes are a scientist, who has come to the island to discover the facts behind the strange tale told him by an old friend, who fell victim to the Shining One, losing his wife and the other members of his exploration party in the process. Luckily, the doctor happens upon a downed Irish-American Royal Air Force fighter pilot calmly floating on the wreckage of his sea plane. Together with a giant Norseman who has lost his wife and child to the Shining One, they proceed to the underworld to see what they can do about it.

Guess what? They meet some beautiful women, though one of them is only beautiful on the outside. The men, however, tend to be dwarves and gigantic frogs. You just have to read it, believe me.

Even if you have read adventure books like this from the 1920s and 1930s, you will be grandly entertained by the many twists in this story, but mainly by the gallantry of the characters Merritt presents and the magical, mystical, colorful world they inhabit. You might even learn something. I thought I was somewhat educated, but I had never heard of the incredible ruins in the Pacific (now part of the Federated States of Micronesia) where the story begins.

Though Merritt can't avoid using the conventions and cliches of this type of story in terms of language, characterization, and plotting, he also rises far above them to present a tale that you won't soon forget. (Although the Irishman's ravings about leprechauns and other Irish beings gets more than a little old after a while.) And after all the build up, the book doesn't disappoint in the end, either, leaving us with a conclusive but poignant finale. show less