Abraham MerrittRecensioni

This pulp fiction adventure story was first published in 1932. It is surprisingly free from the prejudiced attitudes to women and ethnic minorities seen in other such fiction, although I did find it a bit irritating that the protagonist often refers to his best friend Jim, who is Cherokee, as "Indian" which seemed racist compared to Jim's nickname for him as "old timer". However, they are close friends as is shown in the story so I made allowances for the period in which this was written.

Leif, who has Nordic heritage, and Jim are travelling in a remote area of Alaska where they are meant to be looking for gold, at some time after WWI (where they served together after meeting at University). After they hear mysterious drums, Leif eventually unburdens to Jim and tells him of his experiences when he was working as an engineer in the Gobi Desert. He got on very well with the Mongolian tribes and found that his natural gift for languages enabled him to communicate with them easily (and refreshingly there is not the kind of description of such people that would have been found in the work of contemporaries of Merritt's such as H P Lovecraft). When his team moved north they came into contact with a strange tribe who usually kept themselves to themselves, but who showed an instant proprietary interest in Leif and taught him their language. They then showed up in force and Leif told his employer and colleagues to let them take him as he realised there would be a bloodbath otherwise - and to instantly depart south to the area of the friendly tribes leaving him to extricate himself.

The experiences which followed have haunted Leif since and now he senses that he is about to be drawn into the ambit of the Lovecraftesque being which is worshipped by the mysterious tribe. I won't say more about the plot other than it in some ways draws on the romantic tradition of the lost peoples living in their own mini paradise - Shangri La and the like - which were popular in fiction of the late Victorian period, popularised by writers such as H. Rider Haggard. On the whole, the various ethnic characters and women are treated with respect although Leif's romantic interest Evalie is a bit of a non character.

I found this a bit slow in the middle but it did pick up and on the whole is an entertaining adventure romp with a bit of philosophy regarding whether reincarnation exists or an ancestral memory. It wasn't a keeper, but was a workmanlike read and I am giving it a 3-star rating.

This novel, first published in 1928, and probably a magazine serial before that, differs from the other novels I've read by this author. In this, although there is a hinting at a supernatural element, everything in it is explicable by technology and trickery, and it falls rather more into the fast paced detective/thriller/adventure genre of the time with lots of action.

Briefly, the hero, James Kirkham, is an adventurer known for retrieving ancient artefacts sometimes in rather daring fashion - a sort of Indiana Jones before that character was even thought of. At the start, he has been well paid for one of these missions, but has just lost the lot in bad investments on the stock market - which turn out to have been deliberately manipulated to do so by a crime boss with a difference. This man, who leads a worldwide organisation that includes people highly placed in the government, media, industry and other sectors, and who also keeps an army of drug addicts who will do anything for him for their next fix, has a large collection of stolen art treasures. He has had James watched for some time, has been manipulating him, and has now decided to force James to join his organisation. He arranges to kidnap James in such a way that James' appeals to authority go nowhere. James ends up at his hideout and is drawn into the crime boss' game - and the central part of that is his self-styled posing as Satan.

James and the heroine Eve, with whom he first clashes but shortly forms a devoted attachment, are pretty cardboard as characters, but I liked the Cockney thief/engineer without whom they would not have a prayer. A stereotype, but still engaging.

The book is quite a page turner and not hard to zoom through in a day or so. Pretty forgettable, but good fun while it lasts. There are some slightly old fashioned attitudes in it, with James' views of Satan's possible part Chinese heritage, and the term the Cockney uses which wouldn't be acceptable today - chink - but the book is much less beset by racism than a lot of the popular writing of that period, and even if the heroine is quite often tearful at least she doesn't faint or have hysterics. So a 3 star read.

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 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.

Read this some years ago and wasn't very interested. It is a probably fairly typical example of a particular kind of pulp fiction: mightly hewed Vikings, beautiful compliant women, trusty sidekick of a non Caucasian extraction. People are on ships, they are different groups and the groups are backed by different gods, including Ishtar. There's fighting, and the hero is a slave part of the time. That's all I remember, but I do know I wasn't very keen and there are other books by Merritt that I far prefer to this one.

El Estanque de la Luna, de Abraham Merritt, es una obra que transportará al lector más allá de los confines de la Tierra para sumergirlo en un mundo de fantasía y terror dominado por una desconocida entidad llamada El Resplandeciente. No exenta de ciertas dosis de erotismo que le hizo sufrir la censura durante largo años, el Estanque de la Luna se presenta por primera vez al lector español en su versión íntegra. Una obra imprescindible que influyó en el estilo de Howard Phillips Lovecraft y que inspiró, en gran medida, su creación de los Mitos de Ctulhú, Abraham Merritt forma parte, por derecho propio, junto a Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft o Edgar Rice Burroughs, del gran panteón de los escritores de fantasía del siglo XX.

Cuando John Kenton descubrió la pequeña nave de piedra que procedía de los lejanos tiempos de Sargón de Akkad, no podía imaginar que estaba abriendo una puerta a través del Espacio y el Tiempo que le llevaría a un mundo de magia y aventura, de amor y amistad, pero también de odio y peligro, en el que conocería y desearía a sharane, la sensual sacerdotisa de Ishtar, pero también a Klaneth, el Sacerdote Negro del terrible dios Nergal. Dos seres empeñados en una eterna lucha a muerte, que le arrastrarán a un torbellino de horror, pasión, brujería y violencia.

I read this book as part of my project to read all of the books listed in the D&D Appendix N. I wanted a change of pace from another book I was reading. I picked it because the cover art is cool (but in the end not really relevant) and the fact that it wasn't part of a series of books.

The final result is that I'm not really sure if I enjoyed this book or not. Some parts were great while others I struggled with. The rest of my review will deal with spoilers so maybe skip to the end of my review.

As it often happens in early Fantasy novels, the pacing varied tremendously from one part of the story to another. For example, the search for the entrance to the underground world takes a full 10 chapters while an encounter with a huge 100' Dragon Worm taking less than 2 pages.

In regards to the elaborate prose, as beautiful and well written as it was, the descriptions were in actuality so vague that I often had trouble picturing the scenes in my mind. For some stories, (like [b: Empire of the East|42972023|The Anarchy The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire|William Dalrymple|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1565769891l/42972023._SY75_.jpg|66799833] by [a: Fred Saberhagen|10082|Fred Saberhagen|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1207594469p2/10082.jpg]) this works because the situations are easy to relate to. But in this case, it's difficult to get a clear picture of certain protagonists and locations. This often prevented me from focusing on the story. I would find myself struggling to figure out what I should be imagining.

My first is example is Rador, the characters described as "the green dwarf". Was his skin green? Was it his hair? Nowhere is this clarified. So, as you can guess, I kept imagining an Oompa Loompa! How distracting is that?

My second example is the Dweller, also known as the Shinning One. It's always described as some ray of light with 7 magical orbs of varying colors. It was just so confusing. Often I would just imagine these stories were something spawned by an LSD induced bad trip. And since this is the main antagonist, it really feels like you're missing out on an important part of the story.

Also, some of the mesmerizing locations (like the Amphitheatre of Jet and the Crimson Sea) would have benefited so much from an extra few paragraphs of description just to set the stage. I eventually realized much too late that if I re-read this novel, I would just let my imagination run wild and fill in the gaps. I'm sure this strategy would allow me to fully appreciate this incredible adventure.

And finally, I'll just skip the recurring annoying theme of justifying everything scientifically vs. being superstitious. It was just laughable.

Would I recommend this book? I would but not to everyone.

Readers who want to learn more about the origins of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre would find this book quite interesting.

Also, fans of fantasy RPGs might find lots of inspiration here. I just might pick it up again to use as a background for an awesome dungeon crawl campaign with my group.

But I think most modern fantasy genre readers would have to work their way "up" to this novel.

I liked that.. but i don’t recommend it too strongly. Technically a sequel to [b:The Moon Pool|863689|The Moon Pool|A. Merritt|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348631267l/863689._SY75_.jpg|937185], which was awful, luckily you don’t need to know anything about that to read this.

There.. isn’t really much story in this one, its a lot of descriptions. Luckily its about something akin to A.I. and comparing this early version of A.I. with modern interpretations is what mostly kept my attention.
Oh sure there's still a high priestess and a lovestory and some ancient persians or something... because this is still pulp. However the main event is really the machines.
As i said though lot of descriptions.. long views of a machine city and even longer sections just flying through utter nonsense.. it reminded me of when they’re floating through V’Ger in Star-Trek the Motion Picture.

The descriptive writing is like surfing though.. as long as you can keep processing and visualized it its fine but whenever you lose the thread you can just end up drowning in adjectives for pages.

There are some other interesting aspects, the main characters share lovecrafts terror of the different and this is combined with their sense of white privilege. I loved it whenever they felt themselves mocked by the machines as they always went absolutely nuts over it. Anyway i was rooting for the machines the entire time ;) .

This is an interesting... vision.. when you can keep up with the author and actually manage to visualize it.

Edit: New Words to me.
barmecide :illusory and therefore disappointing.
pandect :a complete body of the laws of a country.

review of
A. Merritt's Seven Footprints to Satan
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 3, 2017

I have a vague memory of reading Merritt's name in association w/ H. P. Lovecraft's. That may be completely false. I've never found Lovecraft very interesting so, apparently, if I ran across that association it didn't do much to compel me to read Merritt. As such, this is the 1st bk I've read by him. I reckon that if I'd been alive & been a literate adult & read it in 1928 when it was 1st published I might've just found it ridiculous pop garbage. However, 89 yrs later, I found it quite enjoyable - maybe b/c I like all the pulp trappings that it excels in exploring.

The 1st p proclaims: "Over 5,000,000 Copies of A. Merritt's Books Sold In Avon Editions". That's impressive. I wonder if Merritt got any of the money or if the publishers managed to screw him. I think of all the big budget movies that've been made from Philip K. Dick bks & I think about his reputedly being so poor that he had to resort to eating dog food when he was alive. According to Wikipedia, Merritt was highly pd so I can't point an accusatory finger at publishers for this one.

"The clock was striking eight as I walked out of the doors of the Discoverers' Club and stood for a moment looking down lower Fifth Avenue. As I paused, I felt with full force that uncomfortable sensation of being watched that had both puzzled and harassed me for the past two weeks. A curiously prickly, cold feeling somewhere deep under the skin on the side the watchers are located; an odd sort of tingling pressure. It is a queer sort of a sensitivity that I have in common with most men who spend much of their lives in the jungle or desert. It is a throwback to some primitive sixth sense, since all savages have it until they get introduced to the white man's liquor." - p 5

That's the 1st paragraph. Whether or not the scene & sentiments are cliché it set a mood for me that I enjoyed & expectations that I looked forward to having fulfilled. I'm reminded of a bk I read when I was very young called The Spider's Den (1925), a detective story by Johnston McCulley. The atmosphere of that one must've made an impression on me. I have a vague memory of its featuring a diabolically clever criminal mastermind running a large network from a secret location full of secret passages. I'm further reminded of the series of movies, initially made by Fritz Lang, about Dr. Mabuse, the 1st of wch was called Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (Dr Mabuse der Spieler) (1922). I suppose these malevolent supergenius stories were all the rage in the 1920s.

The main character's name is James Kirkham. Of course, he has to be a man of unusual courage & character to pit himself against the crimelord.

"As I turned down Fifth Avenue from the Discoverers' Club a man passed me, a man whose gait and carriage, figure and clothing, were oddly familiar.

"I stood stock still, looking after him as he strolled leisurely up the steps and into the Club.

"The, queerly disturbed, I resumed my walk. There had been something peculiarly familiar, indeed disquietingly familiar, about that man. What was it? Making my way over to broadway, I went down that street, always aware of the watchers.

"But it was not until I was opposite City Hall that I realized what that truly weird familiarity had been. The realization came to me with a distinct shock.

"In gait and carriage, in figure and clothing, from light brown overcoat, gray soft hat, to strong Malacca cane that man had been—Myself!" - p 8

Obviously, the diabolical potential of that is strong. I wonder when the 1st identity theft story was? According to thebalance.com "In early American history, identity theft was more focused on voter registration and had more to do with ballot stuffing." That means pre-1930s. In Seven Footprints to Satan the charlatan is able to imitate Kirkham so perfectly that even people close to him are unable to tell the difference. I find that extremely unlikely. But, of course, this story is meant to be fantastic not realistic.

As Kirkham gets more & more hopelessly enmeshed in the plot he has a moment of vain hope that someone in the general public might help him: "The hopefulness faded steadily as I studied their faces. Sadly I realized that old Vanderbilt had been all wrong when he had said, "The public be damned." What he ought to have said was "The public be dumb." (p 22)

Kirkham eventually meets his puppet-master adversary Satan (as the title has more or less already told you):

"I began to glance about the dimly lighted room and realized that here, like the great hall, was another amazing treasure chamber. if half of what my eyes took in was genuine, the contents of that room alone were worth millions. But they could not be—not even an American billionaire could have gathered such things.

""But they are genuine," again he read my thoughts. "I am a connoisseur indeed—the greatest in the world. Not alone of paintings, and of gems and wines and other masterpieces of man's genius. I am a connoisseur of men and women. A collection of what, loosely, are called souls. That is why, James Kirkham, you are here!"" - p 30

"Satan for the first time turned his eyes away from me, looking over my head. I had come to the third stage of this mysterious game.

""Did you ever hear the legend of the seven shining footsteps of Buddha?" he asked me. I shook my head." - p 36

Now, rather than spoil this for the possible reader, I'll make up my own story about "the seven shining footsteps of Buddha": Buddha & Satan were playing chess w/ unborn children as the pieces. Satan's unborn children were capable of breathing fire while Buddha's were capable of being so ethereal that fire left them unscathed. Both of them had tricks up their sleeves that were unfathomable to the other not b/c of superior trickiness but b/c of massively incompatible mindsets. Satan had just fused half of his pieces into one massive super-powered meta-piece & divided the remaining pieces into a multitude of almost invisibly small pieces that were plagues.

If Buddha's pieces had been made of any sort of material susceptible to decay, such as ivory or wood, the plagues wd've been able to render them inoperable. Instead, Buddha's pieces were made of transcendent intelligence unmoved from their purpose even by the most convincing malicious gossip. 7 strategically placed 'footprints' of these pieces were capable of enlightening any of Satan's pawns so that they became free of Satan's manipulation whilst retaining his good taste in art. His meta-piece immediately stepped on several of these footprints at once & became released from Satan's will. The 1st thing it decided to do was lay down on the chessboard & take a nap - effectively ending the game & experiencing some very pleasant dreams in the process. In its dream, the meta-piece has Kirkham encounter a soldier whose life he'd saved. Both are imprisoned by Satan.

""I was an electrician before the war," came the whisper in the dark. "None better. Master at it. 'E knows I am. It's why 'e lets me live, as I told you. Satan—augh-h-h!

""Things were different after the war. Jobs 'ard to get an' livin' 'igh. Got lookin' at things different, too. Seen lots of muckers who hadn't done a thing in the war but live cushy and pile up loot. What right 'ad they to 'ave all they 'ad when them as 'ad fought an' their families was cold an' 'ungry?

"" 'Andy with my 'ands I always was. An' light on my feet. Climb! Climb like a cat. Climb like a bloody centipede. An' quiet! A spook in galoshes was a parade compared to me. I ain't praisin' myself, sir. I'm just tellin' you.["]" - p 57

I'm sure you can see where that's going. The above speaker, Barker, becomes a cat burglar & from there to one of Satan's pawns. & what diabolical crimelord doesn't have drug addict slaves?

""Looked like dopes," he says, "and then again they didn't. Their faces weren't a sick white, more of a transparent. They didn't behave like dopes, either. They seemed to be talking sensible enough. Dressed top-notch, too."" - p 99

"Dope" apparently originated as a word referring to a thick viscous liquid in the early 19th century. When I was a kid the dangerously fume-producing glue used to put models together was called "dope" or "model airplane dope". In the late 19th century drug users became known as "dope fiends", apparently because the opium smoked was thick & viscous. The US Army's cartoonish idiot character was called "Joe Dope". Perhaps the above-referred characters were Joseph & Josephine Dope.

"" 'E lets me use the kehft slyves," he answered astonishingly.

""That's twice to-night I've heard their name," I said. "What are they?"

""Them?" there was loathing and horror in his voice. "They fair give you the creeps. 'E feeds 'em the kehft. Opium, coke, 'asheesh—they're mother's milk compared to it. Gives each one of 'em 'is or 'er particular Paradise—till they wake up. Murder's the least of what they'll do to get another shot. Them fellows in the white nightgowns that stood on the steps with their ropes, was some of 'em. You've heard of the Old Man of the Mountains who used to send out the assassins. Feller told me about 'em in the war.["]" - p 61

Ah, yes, Hassan i Sabbah. I've never understood what the attraction of the Old Man of the Mountains was for people like William S. Burroughs & Peter Lamborn Wilson. He just seems like yet-another religious manipulator of the worst sort to me. It's interesting to see him pop up, albeit as an aside, in Seven Footprints to Satan. Anyway, this is pulp & it's the type of pulp that has the ingredients for my favorite pulp recipe.

"A castle with no stairs or "honest doors." . . . A labyrinth of secret passages and sliding panels. And the little thief creeping, creeping through the walls, denied the open, patiently marking down one by one their secrets." - p 63

Anyway, yeah, I had fun reading this. In the end, Satan changes his name to Joe Dope & sells real estate under the business name of Winchester & plays chess in the public parks. JUST KIDDING.

review of
A. Merritt's The Metal Monster
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 14-18, 2019

For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1160673-metal-monster-merritt

"Before the narrative which follows was placed in my hands, I had never seen Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, it author." - p 5

By now, that's a fairly familiar framing device: the author presents a fictional context in which his bk exists as if to give it factual validity. This strikes me as a particularly late 19th, early 20th century device. Maybe I'm wrong about that. This bk was originally copyrighted in 1920. William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland was written in 1908. As I write in my review of that: "The protagonists find a manuscript at a ruin & decide to read it." ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2127802453 ). Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships (1995) is a spin-off of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895). In that:

"Stephen Baxter's "Editor's Note" begins:

""The attached account was given to me by the owner of a small second-hand bookshop, situated just off the Charing Cross Road in London. He told me it had just turned up as a manuscript in an unlabeled box, in a collection of books which had been bequeathed to him after the death of a friend; the bookseller passed the manuscript on to me as a curiosity—"You might make something of it"—knowing of my interest in the speculative fiction of the nineteenth century.

""The manuscript itself was typewritten on commonplace paper, but a pencil note attested that it had been transcribed from an original "written by hand on a paper of such age that it has crumpled beyond repair." That original, if it ever existed, is lost. There is no note as to the manuscript's author, or origin." - p vii" - https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1106360-baxter

Such a beginning from Merritt is no surprise. What did surprise me more was the following:

"The man to whom the President of the Association introduced me was sturdy, well-knit, a little under average height. He had a broad but rather low forehead that reminded me somewhat of the late electrical wizard Steinmetz." - p 5

How many readers of this review remember Charles Proteus Steinmetz? Now how many of you remember Edison? Tesla? Westinghouse? Steinmetz was famous around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century but seems to be largely forgotten now. When I was a little kid in elementary school, I read a biography about him that I found very inspiring. I even dressed up as him for some sort of costume event at school. He was a hunch-back who wore all black & smoked cigars. He cd generate 'lightning'. It's funny to see mention of him in The Metal Monster b/c it reminds me that he still wd've been topical then, even though he was dead.

This is a fantastic adventure story, quite well-written if one can get beyond a tedium that borders on purple prose.

"In Teheran I had picked up a most unusual servant; yes, more than this, a companion and counselor and interpreter as well.

"He was a Chinese; his name was Chiu-Ming. His first thirty years had been spent at the great Lämasery of Palkhor-Choinde at Gyantse, west of Lhasa. Why he had gone from there, how he had come to Teheran, I never asked. It was most fortunate that he had gone, and that I had found him. He recommended himself to me as the best cook within ten thousand miles of Pekin." - p 11

Of course, the 'important thing' here is that he's Chinese & thus can be 'picked up' to be a servant to a 'Westerner'. It wdn't matter if he spoke 75 languages & cd fly he'd still be a servant to the most ignorant American or Britisher. Also, if someone needs to be killed off w/o upsetting the presumed reader too much the Chinese guy can be the one to go.

The writing is 'poetic', by wch I mean full of extravagant & colorful descriptive & metaphorical fluorishes.

"At its eastern end towered the colossal scarp of the unnamed peak through one of whose gorges we had crept. On his head was a cap of silver set with pale emeralds—the snow fields and glaciers that crowned him. Far to the west another gray and ochreous giant reared its bulk, closing the vale. North and south, the horizon was a chaotic sky land of pinnacles, spired and minareted, steepled and turreted and domed, each diademed with its green and argent of eternal ice and snow." - p 12

"The rays seemed to spring upward from the earth. Now they were like countless lances of light borne by marching armies of Titans; now they crossed and angled and flew as though they were clouds of javelins hurled by battling swarms of the Genii of Light. And now they stood upright while through them, thrusting them aside, bending them, passed vast, vague shapes like mountains forming and dissolving; like darkening monsters of some world of light pushing through thick forests of slender, high-reaching trees of cold flame; shifting shadows of monstrous chimerae slipping through jungles of bamboo with trunks of diamond fire; phantasmal leviathans swimming through brakes of giant reeds of radiance rising from the sprakling ooze of a sea of star shine." - pp 70-71

Whew! I'm not sure that anyone writes like that anymore. Merritt & Hodgson have this style of writing in common. They also describe scenes in this way for llllloooooonnnnnnnngggggg periods of time, commas of splintch.

Now, of course, our main characters are a zillion miles from home in an area where there's little sign of fellow human beings & what shd happen?:

"Out darted a girl. A rifle dropped from her hands. Straight she sped toward me.

"And as she ran I recognized her.

"Ruth Ventnor!" - p 24

She sure does get around.

""Richard Drake," I said. "Son of old Alvin—you knew him Mart."

""Knew him well," cried Ventnor, seizing Dick's hand. "Wanted me to go to Kamchatka to get some confounded sort of stuff for one of his devilish experiments. Is he well?"

""He's dead," replied Dick soberly." - p 25

Now, if Kamchatka is famous for the abundance and size of its brown bears & Kathmandu is the capital and largest city of Nepal I have to wonder if this is some sort of code for going to Kathmandu to get drugs. If this were a century later, the drug might be ketamine. I dunno, maybe it had something to do w/ Heavy Metal.

"With the same startling abruptness there stood erect, where but a moment before they had seethed, a little figure, grotesque; a weirdly humorous, a vaguely terrifying foot-high shape, squared and angled and pointed and animate—as though a child should build from nursery blocks a fantastic shape which abruptly is filled with throbbing life.

"A troll from the kindergarten! A kobold of the toys!

"Only for a second it stood, then began swiftly to change, melting with quicksilver quickness from one outline into another as square and triangle and spheres changed places." - p 34

A large portion of this bk, perhaps the majority of it, is dedicated to description of this living metal. After a while I found myself (I have no idea where I'd been until then) longing for a break from such description but I have to give Merritt credit for his obsessive VISION, such visions as that of the geometric smiting thing.

"It melted once more—took new form. Where had been pillar and flailing arms was now a tripod thirty feet high, its legs alternate globe and cube and upon its apex a wide and spinning ring of sparkling spheres. Out from the middle of this ring stretched a tentacle—writhing, undulating like a serpent of steel, four score yards at least in length.

"At its end cube, globe and pyramid had mingled to form a huge trident. With the three long prongs of this trident the thing struck, swiftly, with fearful precision—joyously—tining those who fled, forking them, tossing them from its points high in the air." - p 44

Even though this bk is only 100 yrs old, it's obvious that the English language has changed over that time & that vocabularies have changed. I actually feel HAPPY just to read words like "trident" & "tining" — not that they're particularly obscure in these times but they're somewhat 'out-of-fashion'.
& what about pony toss? Why, in my youth it was 6 to one half a baker's dozen to t'other that we'd play pony toss at the same time that we'd play croquet.

""Catch," he called; placed one hand beneath the beast's belly, the other under its throat; his shoulders heaved—and up shot the pony; laden as it was, landed softly upon four wide-stretched legs beside me, The faces of the two gaped up, ludicrous in their amazement." - pp 57-58

Why, back in those days, if you drank too much alcohol even your shoulders heaved, albeit a dry heave.

"The sun? Reason returned to me; told me that this globe couldn't be that.

"What was it then? Ra-Harmachis, of the Egyptians, stripped of his wings, exiled and growing old in the corridors of the Dead? Or that mocking luminary, the cold phantom of the God of light and warmth which the old Norsemen believed was set in their frozen heel to torment the damned?" - p 64

At 1st I thought: 'It must be Ra-Harmachis, I mean, that's most logical.' Then I remembered being at the bar last night & I took a closer look at the globe & saw that there were 2 of them. But just to make sure I started asking myself more questions.

"What was their color? It came to me—that of the mysterious element which stains the sun's corona, that diadem seen only when our day star is in eclipse; the unknown element which science has named coronium, which never yet has been found on earth and that may be electricity in its one material form; electricity that is ponderable; force whose vibrations are keyed down to mass; power transmuted into substance." - p 80

No, I was confusing corona w/ areola.

"During the total solar eclipse of 7 August 1869, a green emission line of wavelength 530.3 nm was independently observed by Charles Augustus Young (1834–1908) and William Harkness (1837–1903) in the coronal spectrum. Since this line did not correspond to that of any known material, it was proposed that it was due to an unknown element, provisionally named coronium.

"In 1902, in an attempt at a chemical conception of the aether, the Russian chemist and chemical educator Dmitri Mendeleev hypothesized that there existed two inert chemical elements of lesser atomic weight than hydrogen. Of these two, he thought the lighter to be an all-penetrating, all-pervasive gas, and the slightly heavier one to be coronium. Later he renamed coronium as newtonium.

"It was not until the 1930s that Walter Grotrian and Bengt Edlén discovered that the spectral line at 530.3 nm was due to highly ionized iron (Fe13 ); other unusual lines in the coronal spectrum were also caused by highly charged ions, such as nickel, the high ionization being due to the extreme temperature of the solar corona." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronium

Imagine being Isaac Newton & having Alectrona's areola named after you & then having the honor be reduced to a bunch of ionized metals. Life isn't fair. Of course, no matter where you turn Ruth Ventnor's there.

""It whispered to me first," she said, "from Norhala—when she put her arm around me. It whispered and then seemed to float from her and cover me like—like a veil, and from head to foot. It was a quietness and peace that held within it a happiness at one and the same time utterly tranquil and utterly free.

""I seemed to be at the doorway to unknown ecstasies—and the life I had known only a dream—and you, all of you—even Martin, dreams within a dream. You weren't—real—and you did not—matter."

""Hypnotism," muttered Drake, as she paused.

""No," she shook her head. "No—more than that.["]" - p 99

Sexual parasitism? You know, like when the female spider eats the male after consummation? Comsumption after consummation? What if Ruth had been a spider who'd just eaten Isaac Newton?

""It was as though I were the shining shadow of a star afloat upon the breast of some still and hidden woodland pool; as though I were a little wind dancing among the mountain tops; a mist whirling down a quiet glen; a shimmering lance of the aurora pulsing in the high solitudes.

""And there was music—strange and wondrous music and terrible, but not terrible to me—who was part of it. Vast chords and singing themes that rang like clusters of little swinging stars and harmonies that were like the very voice of infinite law resolving within itself all discords. And all—all—passionless, yet—rapturous.

""Out of the Thing that held me, out from its fires pulsed vitality—a flood of inhuman energy in which I was bathed. And it was as though this energy were—reassmbling me, fitting me even closer to the elemental things, changing me fully into them." - p 100

I know it sounds thrilling, ladies, but, please don't kill & eat your boyfriends after sex — or ever. Instead, ask yourself:

"["]What is the definition of vital intelligences—sentience?"

""Haeckel's is the accepted one. Anything which can receive a stimulus and retains memory of a stimulus must be called an intelligent, conscious entity. The gap between what we have long called the organic and the inorganic is steadily decreasing. Do you know of the remarkable experiments of Lillie upon various metals?" - p 107

"No, I don't" the woman temporarily distracted from murdering & eating her boyfriend after sex sd. "Please tell me more."

For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1160673-metal-monster-merritt

Completely over the top pulp adventure with dinosaurs and ray guns, force fields and genetic engineering, a Dark Lord and a Snake Goddess. This is great stuff, i'm not a big fan of pulps but this has a more descriptive style than most. Its sort of like half-way between Burroughs and H.P.Lovecraft.
In structure its a bit like the 'Chronicles of Riddick' in that it started out as a short story and years later the author expanded it into other crazyness. Unlike 'Pitch Black' however its the crazy over the top part of this which is really enjoyable. There is the usual princess and blank slate protagonist but some of the side characters have real personality which makes up for the card board cutout hero.
Also you might get a strong 'Lord of the Rings' vibe in places, i'm assuming thats coincidence and that Tolkien never read this but you never know :) .
The author throws absolutely every idea he can into this story, if you ever wanted to try a pulp this is the one to start with.

Forests of tree-high mosses spangled over with blooms of every conceivable shape and colour; cataracts and clusters, avalanches and nets of blossoms in pastels, in dulled metallics, in gorgeous flamboyant hues; some of them phosphorescent and shining like living jewels; some sparkling as though with dust of opals, of sapphires, of rubies and topazes and emeralds; thickets of convolvuli like the trumpets of the seven archangels of Mara, king of illusion, which are shaped from the bows of splendours arching his highest heaven!

I really liked the other Merritt i've read [b:The Face in the Abyss|952307|The Face in the Abyss|A. Merritt|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1456617424l/952307._SY75_.jpg|937218], but this one... My main issue with pulps normally is the lack of descriptive writing, hence my liking the previous Merritt i read, as he's a far better writer than the likes of Burroughs.
I like my prose as purple as possible... but there are limits! and Merritt blew those limits to pieces in this one. Take a look at the example above. There are dozens of sentences like that one, most of which have some allusions to ancient sumerian legend or Navajo myth or something like the "trumpets of the seven archangels of Mara, king of illusion" above. Its so much... Also no matter how much description was used i still found it very difficult to picture what was being described.

But the prose is only one problem, the plot only really starts about a third of the way through. We begin with frankly a more interesting setup and group of characters than the ones we get stuck with.
The entire middle section is the most pulpy bit but actually remarkably little happens in it, there is a distinct lack of incident. Then we have several chapters of exposition before a rushed and pretty jeopardy free ending.

There are plenty of interesting ideas but not enough to save it for me, still 2-stars i'll admit is being a bit harsh.

Notes:
I've noticed that Merritt includes elements of Lovecraft but also creatures which should be Lovecraftian but arn't. If Lovecrafts Deep Ones, appeared in a Merritt tale they'd probably be the good guys which is quite interesting.

Made available by the Merril Collection. I had to alternate between reading and a Librivox recording to get through it.
Edit: Having perused other reviews it seems like anyone who likes other Merritt books hates this one, which is comforting, since i have more Merritt on my to-do list :) .

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Merritt-Les-habitants-du-mirage/43726

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Merritt-La-nef-dIshtar/16498
> BAnQ (Grand G., Le devoir, 3 mai 1975) : https://collections.banq.qc.ca/ark:/52327/2775031

This is the story of a botanist who witnesses something strange and terrifying, tries - with the help of companions met along the way - to save the life of a friend gone missing, and ends up in a bromance for the ages. It's a fun read as a pulp adventure, provided you don't mind the completely over-the-top florid prose (see the author's quotes page for some examples). All the right stuff is here: a hidden, underground civilization; powerful artifacts of lost, ancient science; a beguiling but devilish priestess; a powerful entity of unspeakable evil; a quest for revenge; a stereotyped Irishman; Bolsheviks!

However, it apparently comes from a time when science fiction meant that science could be pure fiction. All the "scientific" explanations are positively eye roll-inducing, and at times go on for so long that one feels one's somehow ended up in the whaling chapters from Moby Dick. I mean, I know this is "early" SF, but I'm fairly certain that by 1919, when AFAIK this was first published, no one believed in transmission of energy through the aether any more, nor that the chemical composition of the moon changes the nature of the light it reflects. I really think I'd have enjoyed this more if I hadn't approached it as SF, but instead as a pure pulp novel, a la [b:King Solomon's Mine|23814|King Solomon's Mines (Allan Quatermain, #1)|H. Rider Haggard|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1389152178s/23814.jpg|575986].

High fantasy, with a mediocre plot (modern man swept into a fantasy world, it has been done before), and a rather surprising ending (I must admit, I had suspected a totally different outcome).

That being said, I rather enjoyed reading this tome, for the same reason I usually enjoy this type of books: the language. It is so elaboratly descriptive, with beautiful, nowadays underused words, it gives the whole story a bit of a mystical air (like these 2 sentences found on page 163:
Kenton, climbing, heard thunderings like the clashing of armied shields; clanging of countless cymbals, tintamarre of millions of gongs of brass. Ever louder grew the clangor as he ascended; with it mingled now the diapason of mighty winds, staccato of cataracts of rain.)

At first I didn't really appreciate the prose, but the author does have a very interesting grasp of description, as long as length doesn't bother you. I wanted to check out a classic of horror in the general field of the cthulhu mythos that has been rated rather highly, but I honestly got tied up with the overblown stereotyped characters. As long as a reader can get beyond these faults, (that weren't faults of the time period it was written,) then there are a number of beautiful aspects to the novel that redeem it. His imagination is quite well developed for the main creature. It was easy to turn the novel into a cheesy 50's sci-fi in my mind, but giving it modern special effects. Too bad this would turn into one of the most absolutely horrible films... ever... for stories, if it were produced; otherwise, the action scenes would have been an absolute charm. What I am reminded of is the sheer imaginative power of frank l baum or similar contemporaries, in other ways, a straight adventure novel, as simple as can be.

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 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.

The first quarter of this novel is a readable adventure story: a group of men come together to explore the South American jungle in search of riches. There is even some decent character development and nice imagery. Then . . . things completely fall apart. It becomes science fiction/fantasy. It becomes monotonous, with long passages constantly describing rays, mists, caverns, crypts, passageways, pools, flashes, and other vague terms applicable to the hidden world of spidermen, tame dinosaurs, lizard people, snake goddesses, and dark lords. Oh, yea. There is a big battle at the end. You'll never guess who wins.

There is also the matter of the writing. As with the storyline, it's a tale of two stories. The first quarter of the book is acceptable. But the sf/fantasy is messy. Its prose is tortured. Word choices become repetitive. And even the simple syntax is clumsy and confusing. It's simply bad writing.

Abraham Merritt was a better writer than Robert E. Howard, but that is a low bar. It is of the "Lost Race" and "Demonic Possession " memes. I recall this story as a fun time waster.

This story of devilish dolls attacking people, told by a reluctantly believing doctor, has some great scenes, but suffers from some unnecessary stupidity required to propel the plot, and it is overlong. There are some interesting characters, particularly a very religious Italian gangster and some of his henchmen, but their pursuit of the witch is clumsy at best. And in the end, other than pure evil, what is the motive?½

One of the books that turned me on to heroic fantasy fiction back in the early Seventies.

I've been a fan of Merritt's for a long time. He's little known outside a narrow field these days, but he knew how to drive a plot.

Our protagonist is "sucked" into a sculpure of a boat, finding himself part of the crew and forced to man the oars in a fantasy "Arabian Nights" setting.

That's just the start of a swashbuckling adventure worthy of a Douglas Fairbanks movie. There are sultry maidens, heroic rescues, and black magic, all you'd expect in a fantasy novel of the period.

The writing style seems pulpy and dated these days, but it's a great fast read, and should be on every fantasy reader's bookshelf, just so they can understand the history of the genre.

This is a fairly silly book, but when making allowances for the time and place (it's an oldie!) it's not exactly a bad read. The characters are unconvincing cardboard cutouts, the hero is dashing, the girl (and she's definitely the girl and no more) is lovely, the villain's very bad, and it's all rather racist and sexist and the plot's laughable and nobody would ever behave like that.

What is does have going for it is it's breathless pulp fiction quality, a certain swaggering bravado, but really it's no more deep than any of those 10 minute serialized movies that used to air before the big picture. I would have eaten this up as a tween, but now, I recognize it for what it was, and will move on to more satisfying fare.

Incidentally, despite appearances, this is a action-suspense-thriller, not a supernatural fantasy of any kind. I don't think that's really a spoiler--you should be able to know your genre going in!

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).