(1884-1943)
Fantasy fiction attained new heights of popular acclaim in the work of the best-selling novelist A. Merritt. An influential creative figure, he wrote imaginative tales that bridged the gap between the romantic adventure/fantasy stories of the late Victorian period and the modern era in which he wrote. Merritt’s tales were once almost universally beloved by readers of the genre; in his lifetime and for some years after he was the leading figure in imaginative literature, a lofty stature he has not managed to preserve.
Born in Beverly, New Jersey, to poor Quaker parents, Merritt could not afford to continue studies for his intended career in the law. At 18 he dropped out of school and took a job in the editorial department of the Philadelphia Inquirer. After a mysterious incident involving the young cub reporter—something to do with crime, politics, and an impending trial—the paper sent Merritt into hiding for a year. His subsequent explorations in the jungles and lost cities of Mexico and Central America would provide him with material he would one day use in many of his colorful works of fiction. Returned to the United States, Merritt began a steady climb through the ranks at newspapers in Philadelphia and then New York City. Beginning in 1912, Merritt helped to make a spectacular success out of William Randolph Hearst’s Sunday tabloid, the American Weekly.
Merritt’s work schedule was demanding, but he found spare time to begin a fiction-writing sideline. Some critics speculate that Merritt, in fact, turned to fantasy writing as a release from the distasteful aspects of his weekly exposure to the corrupt and the sensational. His fiction, set in fantastic and gothic territories, had little to do with the everyday grime of the real world. His first short story was printed in November 1917 by All-Story magazine, the pulp that had done much to make a literary star out of Edgar Rice burroughs. “Through the Dragon Glass” was a haunting tale of a man who discovers a passage through an ancient Chinese mirror into a bizarre alternative world of both beauty and horror. In the following year, All-Story published what would become part of Merritt’s first novel-length work, The Moon Pool, an eerie, exotic horror adventure about a mysterious pool discovered in the jungles of a Pacific island. The novelette was so well received that Merritt quickly constructed a sequel, Conquest of the Moon Pool, the first of what would become Merritt’s signature story line of a lost civilization, patterned after H. Rider haggard’s fantastic adventure novel, She. Merritt’s explorer/scientist heroes, roaming the Himalayas, the South Pacific, Latin America, and other tropic, exotic regions, would typically happen upon a colony of survivors of an ancient or unknown society, whereupon many strange and breathless adventures would invariably take place. Merritt found this premise so congenial that he would use it in all but two of his eight novels.
Merritt’s second novel, The Metal Monster, serialized in 1920, was another lost-civilization story, with the American heroes in the Himalayas battling the remains of an ancient Persian tribe. Mer-ritt gives the Haggard premise a startling SF twist this time—the discovery of yet another civilization behind the scenes, an alien outpost manned by metallic soldiers from outer space. Merritt followed this with the high adventure novella The Face in the Abyss and the delirious time-traveling fantasy The Ship of Ishtar. His next was a change of pace, Seven Footprints to Satan, a bizarre mystery story of decadent game-playing, devil worship, and psychological torture. The novel was given a brilliant transfer to the screen in the 1920s, by director Benjamin Christensen. In 1932 Merritt published his masterpiece, Dwellers in the Mirage, another lost-civilization story that brilliantly crystallized all the elements Merritt’s style, combining scenes of spectacular adventure with psychological portraiture in richly descriptive prose. Dwellers was a hard act to top, but Merritt came close with his next work, Burn, Witch, Burn, a brilliant tale of modern-day necromancy, murder, and revenge (loosely adapted to film by Tod Browning as The Devil Doll, in 1936). Creep, Shadow, Creep, which carried over some of the characters from Burn, was another modern gothic, an eerily effective and sus-penseful tale of witches and warlocks, who attempt to restore a long-abandoned rite of human blood sacrifice.
After the publication of Creep, Shadow, Creep, Merritt seemed to abandon his successful fiction writing career. He continued with his hectic day job as an important Hearst editor, but produced no other substantial works of fiction (a few stories and possible fragments of novels were later found and published). In 1943, while on a business trip to Florida, Merritt died of a heart attack at 59.
For all of his emphasis on outlandish plot turns and eye-popping action, Merritt was a skilled writer with a distinctive, almost lyrical style. His stories had the compulsive readability of Edgar Rice Burroughs but with additional layers of poetic reflection and philosophical intent. Merritt made creative use of the then-new concepts of psychology—regression, repressed memories, and so on—introduced by Sigmund Freud. In his heyday between the world wars, Merritt was not only popular but also beloved. He affected readers deeply—readers commonly rated his stories among their all-time favorites for decades, and many contemporary science fiction and fantasy writers would hold A. Merritt as a favorite and an inspiration.
Works
- Burn, Witch, Burn! (1933);
- Creep, Shadow, Creep! (1933);
- Dwellers in the Mirage (1932);
- Face in the Abyss, The (1931);
- Fox Woman and Other Stories, The (1949);
- Metal Monster, The (serialized 1920;
- first topic publication 1946);
- Moon Pool, The (1920);
- Seven Footprints to Satan (1928);
- Ship of Ishtar, The (1926)
