Appendix N Review: The Face in the Abyss

Back to Abraham Merritt, because mind-blowing forgotten fiction is good for you.

Today it's The Face in the Abyss, which is a fix-up novel published in 1931 and based off two novelettes: The Face in the Abyss published in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1923 and The Snake Mother published in Argosy in 1930, seven years later.

If you're keeping track, its technically his fifth novel, but only because it took so long between parts. The Metal Monster was 1920 and The Ship of Ishtar was 1924.

The story considers one Nick Graydon, an American mining engineer recruited for an adventure in South America in search of lost Incan treasure. The three other men are Starrett, a rough and tumble drunk, Soames, a lanky New Englander, and Dancret, a small, quiet Frenchman. They get lost deep in the jungle and tensions, already high, erupt when a beautiful young woman named Suarra is caught by Starrett around their camp. Graydon knocks out Starrett in a fit of berserker rage (the first of many he will experience over the course of the adventure) and learns the woman, Suarra, speaks a local language. The attraction between the two is immediate, and Graydon lets Suarra go, and she promises to bring back treasure to get the other men to leave the valley they're in.

It doesn't go well. Graydon's companions think he's ratting them out and their greed gets the better of them. They finagle their way into having Suarra take them to the source of the treasure, and so she does. A hidden valley where powerful men ride dinosaurs, and a giant obsidian face sweats gold out of its eyes and mouth.

Then it gets wild. Dinosaur arena fights, lizardmen, winged messenger snakes, advanced ancient technology, refugees from a lost civilization from now-frozen Antarctica called Yu-Atlanchi (and sharing common elements with the Atlantis myth), the shadowy Nimir LORD OF EVIL, creepy but friendly red spider-men called weavers and their leader Kon, and a mysterious and beautiful Snake Mother named Adana, who has powers beyond what the city itself has.

Graydon is a solid protagonist. Intelligent but quick to action, even when it gets him in trouble. Strong-willed and prone to the red mist rage when his sense of honor is thoroughly offended, he's a better hero than the bland crew from The Metal Monster but not quite on the level of John Kenton or (especially) Larry O'Keefe. Graydon's also an expert shot with a rifle.

Its also clear that Merritt's cast of stock characters is in full effect. Kon is the misshapen but strong and loyal friend, Regor is the battle-scarred big guy, and so on. Shockingly enough, the love interest Suarra ISN'T a redhead but a brunette.

The real star is the mysterious Adana. Upper-body of a beautiful woman, lower body of a snake, and ALL monstergirl, she's not the villain. Far from it, she's one of the most altruistic characters in the book. Which is funny when she's discussing melancholic matters with Graydon and then pausing to examine how she looks in a mirror. She feels like a real person with quirks and vanities, and a snake body.

Like all of the other Merritt books I've read so far, he just throws out one wild idea after another at the audience and keeps everything tied together and building until an explosive finale. Really solid stuff. I'm not going anywhere near spoilers, but I'll say this: it reads like one of those weird high-concept AD&D 1^st Edition adventure modules. In a good way.

Absolutely recommended. Merritt is a goldmine.

Its also interesting to note that in my online wanderings, I found a set of photos from the 1980 Westercon on the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society website. Aside from being an amusing time capsule of hideous wallpaper and some very excellent early cosplay work, one of the guests was dressed up as Adana the Snake Mother. Which means Merritt was relevant as late as the 80s to inspire detailed (and bold) costume work.

Appendix N Review: The Metal Monster

After jumping face-first into old pulp novels this year, my personal standout (and author I've been most angry about never hearing of before) is Abraham Merritt. His 1918-1919 debut The Moon Pool was mind-blowingly fun and 1924's The Ship of Ishtar is a bona fide fantasy masterpiece. Seriously. Read it. Read them both. They're great.

In 1920, Merritt wrote The Metal Monster as the sequel to The Moon Pool featuring the same narrator/protagonist, Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, off on another exotic adventure. Originally serialized in the Argosy All-Story Weekly, it was later edited into a full-length book and published in 1941.

In it, Goodwin is traipsing around Central Asia near the Himalayas where he meets Dick Drake, adventurer son of an old acquaintance of Goodwin's. Then, investigating a strange aurora, they discover Martin Ventnor and his sister Ruth. Then they're chased by a group descended from a lost city of Persians (who war full battle armor and use spears and bows). With their guides dead and most of the pack animals run off, things look bad until a strange but beautiful and very, very powerful redhead named Norhala rescues them. Human, but also something else, Norhala can command electrical and magnetic forces and is connected to a bizarre city made up millions of ever-shifting living metal Things.

It should work, and in many places it does, such as in Merritt's specific style of beautifully grotesque action sequences. The beginning sets a remote and bleak mood fitting for the setting and the ending is wonderfully apocalyptic.

Unfortunately, its all the stuff in the middle that doesn't quite click.

The Metal Things are suitably weird, and possibly an alien hive mind. Its difficult to tell, since they can't speak human languages. Their origins are vague, as are their motives, but they're capable of draining direct energy from the Sun and causing sunspots (in a fun scene that actually takes into account the speed of light). The Things themselves can move and combine and shape themselves into various forms, including flying cubes, lumbering giants, and the very structures of their city.

They're weird and wonderful and predate John von Neumann's 1948 theory by 28 years and John Bernal's 1929 lecture “The World, the flesh and the Devil” anticipating self-replicating machines by 9 years. (Suck on that, Commies!)

They also have a staggering visual and “sociological” similarity to D&D Modrons, 63 years before their first appearance. And a full 94 years before Knack!

Seriously, they form up and move around like Knack

The bad part is that Merritt spends a staggering amount of time trying to explain how wondrous this is. The characters spend four full chapters on a flying cube trying to wrap their heads around what's going on. That's...not great pacing for an ADVENTURE story. There are great ideas being played around with, but the closer it gets to Hard Sci-Fi, the more it bogs down and frankly, starts to get boring.

Pacing issues give way to a very clear demonstration that Merritt likes to use certain stock characters: There's two intellectuals, except Martin Ventnor spends most of the book either worrying about his sister or in a coma. There's the two-fisted, upright man of action, except Drake is a pale shadow of the quirky Larry O'Keefe from The Moon Pool. There's a hunched, ugly but surprisingly strong servant figure, only Yuruk is more treacherous than The Ship of Ishtar's Gigi.

Then there's the elephant in the room: This is the third Merritt book I've read that prominently features an exotic, beautiful, immensely powerful redhead. Lakla, Sharane, and now Norhala.

Merritt clearly likes what he likes, and I'm more than fine with that.

Unlike the other two, Norhala is destructively ferocious when roused (as the Persians eventually learn) and never fully becomes a hero or a love interest. There's the barest hint of a connection between her and Goodwin, but that's all.

Ruth is no slouch either, despite being off-camera taking care of her comatose brother for most of the book. When it comes to shooting, she's got the biggest body count out of the four protagonists.

I'm beginning to suspect Merritt didn't know how to write weak women.

Finally got the hair right on this cover

For me, the biggest problem with the book is that the main characters remain observers throughout. Goodwin and Drake set out to try and find a solution to the predicament, but merely end up going on a Scooby-Doo chase through the Metal Monster city as they try to figure out what the hell's going on.

The plot carries on whether they get involved or not, and the climax is spent on a hill watching the fireworks.

I can see how this would impress H. P. Lovecraft (who crowed about the story in a letter) with its unfathomable alien beings dwarfing human understanding, but the characters don't glue the whole thing together. Its difficult to care and Goodwin's dry personality works better in The Moon Pool where he has the hot-blooded O'Keefe to bounce off of. There's no real antagonist to speak of. The Persian leader shows up for one chapter near the end and he's dealt with handily by Norhala (in one of the best sequences in the entire book)

The Metal Monster isn't bad. The Metal Monster is a great concept and Norhala is a scene-stealer. It just grinds itself to a halt describing the Metal Monster's mechanics and Merritt does action/adventure/romance much better in other stories.

This one's optional. 

Appendix N Review: The Ship of Ishtar

I'm beginning to come around to the idea that A. Merritt deserves to be considered one of the Grandmasters of fantasy.

The Moon Pool was an imaginative, brilliant, wild adventure of a first novel that lingered a little too long in places before finding its footing for a rip-roaring conclusion.

The Ship of Ishtar is his third book, originally serialized in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1924, begins simply enough: New York historian John Kenton receives a mysterious block of stone dating back to the reign of Sargon of Akkad and within it finds a beautiful miniature ship made of precious metals and ornaments.

Touching it transports him to a strange world outside of time where the ship is real, endlessly sailing on a sea, where divine mandate demands the two factions of the ship endlessly vie for control of it. Klaneth, the evil priest of Nergal and Sharane, priestess of Ishtar.

The two sides are divinely prohibited from crossing over to the other side, except Kenton, which makes him a desirable ally. Only, its not much of a choice, since Klaneth is so cruel and evil that Kenton immediately rejects his offer of alliance and he then falls in love with Sharane.

Periodically Kenton is flung back to New York, where the events of the book take place over one night. Only in the world of the Ship, months can pass between returns to NYC. At one point he is chained to an oar as a galley slave for a long time, honing his body to a physical peak. Those physical changes come back to the modern world with him. Injuries too.

Despite this, Kenton continuously charges back into the world of the ship, either to explore the mystery of its existence, seeking vengeance against Klaneth, repaying the loyalty of the friends he's made there, or (increasingly) out of his love for Sharane.

I'm not doing the book enough justice. There's so much going on. Action, magic, ancient Babylonian gods, a superhumanly strong drummer named Gigi, a badass redheaded Persian warrior named Zubran, and a Viking named Sigurd who swears blood brotherhood to Kenton and Zubran.

In true adventure fashion, the stakes keep raising and the action keeps ramping up. Kenton is a two-fisted kind of hero, quick to action when he makes his decisions. The romance between him and Sharane starts off rocky. She thinks he's an agent of Nergal when he explains that centuries have passed in the outside world, so her handmaidens chase him out with spears. He then swears to avenge his pride by conquering the ship and then her.

Like I said, a rocky start, but it evolves into a beautiful love story where the two complement each other extremely well.

The situations are deeply imaginative, the prose is often lovely, the action is visceral, and Merritt displays a well-rounded understanding of ancient civilizations as they would have been understood in the early 20^th century (Cuneiform had only been reliably translated in the mid-Nineteenth Century, some seventy years before Ship of Ishtar's publication). The culture clash is not as much as one might expect, as Kenton more or less accepts the simpler (but often more brutal) norms of the ancient people he finds himself among.

For instance, the Ship is rowed by galley slaves. Kenton himself is made a slave before freeing himself. After he takes over the ship there is no emancipation. Its a bit odd, considering how the heroes in The Moon Pool are more keen to bring modern values to the underground world, but you have to consider this: The person from a time period closest to Kenton is a Viking from the 9^th Century. Everyone Kenton meets comes from a civilization that, yes indeed, took and used slaves. The modern man is outnumbered, and good luck trying to convince a bunch of non-modern people that slavery is bad.

Ultimately its a minor quibble that is handwaved away. Its not important to the story at hand because in ancient stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh its also not important, and that is the kind of thing Merritt is tapping into.

Where was I?

The Ship of Ishtar is good. Damn good. Read it. And when you do read it, keep an eye on Zubran, because the arc he undergoes is subtle but amazing. 

Appendix N Review: The Moon Pool

Okay.

So.

A. Merritt is one of several authors who've I've become aware of thanks to Appendix N, and when I saw an 8 Novel, 8 Short Story collection of one Abraham Merritt on Amazon for 99 cents, I figured why not?

And then I read The Moon Pool (1919) and so much of what I assumed about the mechanics of science fiction was challenged.

Here is a story that starts out as a proto-Lovecraftian horror tale that makes a convincing monster out of moonlight that lives in the ruins of the island of Nan-Matal (a real place, I might add). As our scientist narrator learns about this Dweller, he accrues two other adventurers to examine the ruins and find the reason for the disappearances.

Then they find the entrance to a bizarre Hollow Earth situation with super strong dwarfs, cloaks of invisibility, disintegration guns, seashell-shaped hover cars, a seductive evil priestess at war with a heroic good priestess, mysterious extradimensional gods, an undead army, and benevolent warrior frog people called the Akka.

This isn't the kind of story that knocks your teeth out like R.E. Howard could crank out effortlessly. The Moon Pool is a slow burn that admittedly spends too much time on exposition. The last few chapters before the climactic battle are a massive infodump of lore and little else. Merritt was a smart man, and its clear that a lot of time was spent thinking up the theology and prehistory of the underground world.

And yet despite a fair bit of clunking around explaining things (this was Merritt's first novel, after all, and by the end it feels as though he's much more confident as a writer than at the beginning), it wins you over with its action and heroes and the rhythm of the language.

Oh yes, it has heroes. Flawed, sometimes motivated by darker impulses, but unabashedly heroic. Dr. Goodwin, the narrator, operates as a narrator whose function is to bear witness to the events, but he's no simple reactionary. He started off on a quest to find a lost friend and does so, at personal expense.

Then there is Captain Olaf Huldricksson, a brawny Norwegian overcome with grief and revenge for his lost wife and daughter, who were taken from his boat by the Shining One of the Moon Pool. A man of few words, most of them Norwegian, he's a secondary character and a modern author would have killed him off in an early scene for cheap drama or had him turn into a villain. Not so here. Even when he spends significant time off screen, Merritt develops the hell out of Olaf to the point where he gets a suitably Scandinavian fate.

This image will make sense when you read the book

Then there's the O'Keefe. Half American, Half Irish, and Half Mad, Larry O'Keefe survived flying in World War I and is rescued from the sea by Goodwin's ship, and then sensing ADVENTURE, signs on with the expedition in a heartbeat. Recklessly brave and hot-blooded about the supremacy of Ireland, he is an enormous skeptic of the supernatural except regarding any Irish myths. At one point, he tells Goodwin that a leprechaun visited him in a dream with advice with a completely straight face. Part of his impulsiveness comes from surviving the horrors of WWI and wanting to wring as much out of life before the end comes. He's also remarkably loyal and won't even stop to think about rushing into danger to help one of his friends. A Hero like Larry needs a woman worth conquering the world for, and Lakla, the auburn-haired good priestess, is just that. Its a whirlwind romance once they finally meet, but the two compliment each other beautifully.

In a modern world of brooding anti-heroes O'Keefe is a breath of fresh air. For whatever reason (that's not worth dipping into here), we've cast aside the ability to make compelling true-blue, Capital H Heroes in the name of being true to reality or some such nonsense.

Larry O'Keefe in The Moon Pool is a reminder that Capital H Heroes are there to inspire us to make reality out of truth.

Big ideas, chilling horror, frog people, and Big Damn Heroes. Its a 98 year old book that crackles with life. 

Absolutely recommended, and its not even Merritt's magnum opus, The Ship of Ishtar.