Book Review: The Moon Pool, Abraham Merritt

This review is not of the 1919 published novel called The Moon Pool. This is actually a review of the original novelette that Merritt published in the June 22, 1918 edition of All-Story Weekly. This was his third published story, following Through the Dragon Glass and The People of the Pit, also published in All-Story Weekly. But this one was the breakthrough, the one that got everyone to sit up and take notice. It was so popular that the publisher asked Merritt to write a sequel. That was published in six parts in early 1919, as Conquest of the Moon Pool. The two stories were then mashed together and edited to create the version that most people who are familiar with the story at all remember the best.

That last part was a convoluted way of saying 'not too many people know about this guy anymore.' But man, he can write a ripping yarn. Merritt's total output is not very heavy; nine novels and nine short stories during his lifetime, with a few fragments published years later. But the influence he laid on the fantasy/weird/horror genres cannot be underestimated.

The Moon Pool is framed as a 'someone told me this' story, wrapped in the conceit of a 'scientific' organization to lend the tale authenticity. The story takes place on a ship in the South Pacific, where Dr. Goodwin encounters an old colleague, Dr. Throckmartin, who is not the man he used to be. The story is told from Throckmartin's perspective as he relates the horrifying tale of what befell himself and his small group of scientists who meddled with things they should have left alone.

According to Throckmartin, his wife, her maid, and his assistant went to the island of Ponape in the Carolines, where the natives warned them to stay away from the island on the nights of the full moon because bad things would happen. Naturally, being scientists, they disregarded the native superstition and determined to study the ruined city of Nan-Matal by the light of the full moon. Oops.

The story seems cliché to modern eyes, but that's because it's men like Merritt and Burroughs who created those clichés in the first place with their incredible stories that truly took popular fiction to places people had never imagined before. They were fresh ideas at the time, and need to be read in that vein. Merritt uses the newness of those clichés to write a tale that drips with weird menace on every page. As Throckmartin tells the tale, the sense of unknowable terrors continues to grow, even as the reader's mind reels at the impossibility of the story. By the end, Throckmartin's fate is sealed, and Goodwin is left with knowledge that would shatter a lesser man.

"Good God!" breathed Throckmartin, and if ever the words were a prayer and an invocation they were. And then, for the first time—I saw—it!

Nearer and nearer it came, borne on the sparkling waves, and less and less grew the protecting wall of shadow between it and us. The crystalline sounds were louder—rhythmic as music from another planet. Now I saw that within the mistiness was a core, a nucleus of intenser light—veined, opaline, effulgent, intensely alive. And above it, tangled in the plumes and spirals that throbbed and whirled were seven glowing lights.

Through all the incessant but strangely ordered movement of the—thing—these lights held firm and steady. They were seven—like seven little moons. One was of a pearly pink, one of delicate nacreous blue, one of lambent saffron, one of the emerald you see in the shallow waters of tropic isles; a deathly white; a ghostly amethyst; and one of the silver that is seen only when the flying fish leap beneath the moon. There they shone—these seven little varicolored orbs within the opaline mistiness of whatever it was that, poised and expectant, waited to be drawn to us on the light filled waves.

Intense, isn't it? And very descriptive. Merritt could turn on the vocabulary when he wanted to, and it shows. And as the story progresses, we know what is going to happen to each member of Throckmartin's party; it's as inevitable as the rising of the moon. But even so, the tale keeps drawing the reader in, making these old clichés seem fresh after all. Just wrap your head around the imagination required to write this:

"As I turned again to call to Stanton, my eyes swept the head of the steps and stopped, fascinated. For the moonlight had thickened more. It seemed to be—curdled—there; and through it ran little gleams and veins of shimmering white fire. A languor passed through me. It was not the ineffable drowsiness of the preceding night. It was a sapping of all will to move. I tore my eyes away and forced them upon Stanton. I tried to call out to him. I had not the will to make my lips move! I had struggled against this paralysis and as I did so I felt through me a sharp shock. It was like a blow. And with it came utter inability to make a single motion. Goodwin, I could not even move my eyes!

"I saw Stanton leap upon the steps and move toward the gateway. As he did so the light in the courtyard grew dazzlingly brilliant. Through it rained tiny tinklings that set the heart to racing with pure joy and stilled it with terror.

"And now for the first time I heard that cry 'Av-o-lo-ha! Av-o-lo-ha!' the cry you heard on deck. It murmured with the strange effect of a sound only partly in our own space—as though it were part of a fuller phrase passing through from another dimension and losing much as it came; infinitely caressing, infinitely cruel!

"On Stanton's face I saw come the look I dreaded—and yet knew would appear; that mingled expression of delight and fear. The two lay side by side as they had on Thora, but were intensified. He walked on up the stairs; disappeared beyond the range of my fixed gaze. Again I heard the murmur—'Av-o-lo-hal' There was triumph in it now and triumph in the storm of tinklings that swept over it. "For another heart-beat there was silence. Then a louder burst of sound and ringing through it Stanton's voice from the courtyard—a great cry—a scream—filled with ecstasy insupportable and horror unimaginable! And again there was silence. I strove to burst the invisible bonds that held me. I could not. Even my eyelids were fixed. Within them my eyes, dry and aching, burned."

Readers voted The Moon Pool the most popular story that All-Story Weekly published in the first half of the twentieth century. Reading it, it's obvious why; Burroughs wrote great adventure stories, and Dunsany wrote fantasy like no one before him or since. Doyle and Haggard created the 'lost world' stories, but Merritt synthesized it all together into a tale so powerful it inspired H.P. Lovecraft himself, the master of weird horror fiction.

So, why doesn't anyone know about this book? How is the man who wrote something like this so obscure today?

Frankly, the answer is Terry Brooks. Fantasy fiction prior to 1977 was a mixed bag, a field where literally anything could happen; Conan knock-offs could fight eldritch horrors on an alien starship and nobody blinked at the weird mix. Pulp fantasy authors from 1920 to the early 1970s were influenced by Dunsany, Burroughs and Merritt, and there were no limits to what they could imagine. Earth so far in the distant future that the sun was red and wizards schemed to steal ancient spells from their rivals; an alternate world where elves and faerie creatures fought a war against the Christian men; a tide-locked Earth where magic and science waged a war; and small hobbits could save the world from ancient evils through their compassion and determination.

All of these were familiar tales to the fantasy readers in the early 1970s. But in 1977, Terry Brooks changed all that with his Sword of Shannara, a book that many people have said is nothing more than a pastiche of the Lord of the Rings. And they would be right; while it is an entertaining read, one I have enjoyed in the past, it really is the herald of the future of fantasy. It's been said that almost all fantasy today is nothing more than people writing Tolkien-style books, epic trilogies with massive worldbuilding and grand quests. I disagree with that assessment; it would be more accurate to say that the majority of fantasy authors today aren't mimicking Tolkien; they just aren't good enough to do that. No, they are mimicking Terry Brooks in their attempts to mimic Tolkien. And that is why there isn't anything new on the shelves anymore; it's all just footnotes to Tolkien and Brooks.

It's a tragic situation, and one that needs to change. And the best way to change that is to bring back the writings of the old masters, the ones who started it all and made fantasy truly fantastic. The sooner we do that, the better. Abraham Merritt being obscure should be an absurd thought to any reasonable fan of science fiction and fantasy. It's no different than fans of vampire romances not knowing about Bram Stoker and Dracula. That's how seminal Merritt is to the fantasy genre.

So, do yourself a favor and check out The Moon Pool. You can find it in its original form at the Internet Archive. Believe me, you won't regret it. Although you might not ever look at the full moon the same way again.

And when you're done with that, you might want to check out my own contribution to pulp fantasy, starting with The Chronicles of Meterra: Arrival.