Dr. Simon Reads Appendix N Part Seventeen: A Merritt

 Dr. Simon Reads Appendix N Part Seventeen: A Merritt

This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See the first part of this series for more information.

This time around, I have reached the works of:

A Merritt

Abraham Grace Merritt, known as A Merritt, was born in New Jersey in 1894, died in Florida in 1943 of a heart attack. Merritt worked primarily as a journalist, bringing in good pay, and the novel writing was more of a sideline for him. He enjoyed travel (which explains the globe-trotting nature of his stories) and collected plants associated with rituals and magic (which is probably why his protagonist Goodwin, from some of the stories, is a botanist by trade).

His biography paints him as a benevolent eccentric, a collector of occult literature and tribal items, a hypochondriac, twice married and unable to fire any of his employees because he felt sorry for them.

There’s not a lot else that comes across from the man. I don’t know why he affected the initial for his preferred by-line; possibly “Abraham” was considered  a bit “too Jewish”, I don’t know. But then, lots of writers do this, so I can’t presume too sinister a motive.

Notes

The Appendix suggests three Merritt stories; The Moon Pool (from 1919), Dwellers in the Mirage (from 1932), and Creep, Shadow (from 1934). Note that in both the 1^st Edition and the 5^th Edition this is given erroneously as “Creep, Shadow, Creep”, but more on this later.

The first two are classic Lost Worlds fiction, wherein the protagonist(s) discover a hidden land full of strange people, creatures and powers that seem magical (but, typically throughout Merritt’s work, what seems magical is described in terms of unexplained science).

In The Moon Pool, botanist Goodwin encounters an old friend of his who is pursued by a strange creature, seemingly made of light, which travels in the light of the moon and abducts his friend. Upon returning to the archaeological site in the Pacific where his friend was working, the ruins of Nan Modol, Goodwin discovers a strange door that opens under moonlight through which the being of light, the Dweller of the Moon Pool (later we learn is also termed The Shining One) can escape.

Accompanied by a rambunctious Irish-American airman Larry O’Keefe, given to lyrical bouts of brogue about Irish folklore, as well as a morose Norwegian sailor and a treacherous Russian scientist, Goodwin discovers that the Dweller comes from an extensive underground land, Muria (evidently meant to evoke Mu and/or Lemuria) , which the inhabitants claim to be what was left behind when the moon was ejected from the Earth. Here, as with all of Merritt’s Lost World stories, they find themselves caught between warring factions of good and evil, with the interesting twist that the Shining One was itself a creation of creatures from deep within the Earth known as the Silent Ones (lots of “Ones”), who fashioned the Shining One out of love, but this is an emotion that it never came to know. The Dweller, the Shining One, is used by the evil faction as an enforcer, but it is clear that it is not a willing servant.

In Dwellers in the Mirage, the protagonist is Leif Langdon, of Scandinavian heritage, and his Cherokee friend Jim Two Eagles, exploring Alaska. Here they stumble upon a hidden valley that looks empty, but this is the eponymous mirage. Living beneath it, in a kind of green twilight reminiscent of Burroughs’ Pellucidar, is the inevitable Lost World, this time a lush jungle land inhabited by a friendly pygmy folk and some cruel Nordic-looking types, called the Ayjir (clearly meant to evoke the idea of the Aesir). Langdon has a flashback to his experiences among the Uighur people, and of the worship of the mysterious kraken-like figure Khral’ku - very Cthulhu-esque.

Beguiled by the evil priestess Lur, Langdon comes to see himself as the legendary figure Dwayanu, and for a while fights on the side of evil before coming to his senses.

Finally, Creep, Shadow (and not, as is given in both the 1^st and 5^th Edition appendices, “Creep, Shadow, Creep”. There is no second “creep”). However, the story is a sequel of sorts to the one that precedes it, which is called “Burn, Witch, Burn!”. So it’s easy to misinterpret it. Unless at one point in history there was a second “creep”.

I think to get the most out of it you really do need to read Burn Witch, Burn! In that one, a psychiatrist Dr Lowell ends up working with the mob boss Ricori, and his henchman McCann, to defeat the sinister Madame Mandilip who is using strange powers to kill people, and possibly capture their soul in creepy lifelike dolls that she sends out to kill more people. In typical Merritt protagonist fashion, Lowell keeps trying to convince himself that the whole deal is some kind of hypnosis employed by Mme Mandilip, and his sanity kind of hinges on his refusal to accept anything supernatural. It’s a pretty good yarn, actually, I’d recommend it.

But the importance of it to Creep, Shadow, is that Lowell and McCann both return; McCann playing a more active role than Lowell, who is a side character and clearly still suffering mentally from the supernatural events of before. For Witch, I read McCann’s vernacular as a typical New York Italian hoodlum style voice, fresh out of Damon Runyon, but here it’s made clear that actually he’s a Texan. This seems ramped up in Shadow, with McCann using a lot of ranching metaphors – referring to some counterfeit notes padding out a bankroll as “mavericks in a herd” for example.

Plotwise, the protagonist is another medical man, Dr Alan Caranac, who may or may not be a reincarnation of Alain de Carnac, an ancient Breton lord. Rather than dolls, people are being killed by mysterious shadows that only they can see and that follow them around, terrorising them to death. The shadows seem to be under control of a strange man, Keradal, whom Lowell and McCann suspect to be the “lover from Prague” that Mme Mandilip mentioned, possibly here to exact revenge. But the real power seems to reside with a woman Keradal is passing off as his daughter, Dahut, Demoiselle d’Ys (see also Robert W Chambers’ The King in Yellow). Supposedly Dahut is the cruel queen of an ancient city off the coast of Britanny, sunk beneath the waves in a more magical past; Caranac, as de Carnac, her lover who betrayed her and her city to supposed death.

Themes

All three of the suggested stories feature a similar motif of “Good Girl/Bad Girl”, whether good Lakla and evil Yolara in The Moon Pool, or the good Evalie and the evil Lur of Dwellers in the Mirage, or Helen and Dahut in this story. Dweller and Shadow also share the motif that the protagonist has some kind of past-life connection to the Bad Girl (in Moon Pool, it is Larry O’Keefe rather than Goodwin that gets caught in the love triangle, but he is much simpler than Langdon and Caranac, who both have a sneaking desire for the Bad Girl that they can’t quite suppress).

In Shadow, Merritt even gives the good woman Helen solar colours, with her auburn hair and tanned skin, while the problematic temptress Dahut has lunar shades with pale skin, white-gold hair and purple eyes. Each time, Merritt gets just a little more psychologically interesting in the relationship.

To the best of my recollection, though, this motif only occurs in these three stories, and not in any of the interlinked one. The nearest, I suppose, is in The Metal Monster, but here the Bad Girl wields all the power and everyone else pretty much succumbs to her will. Even more tantalisingly, there’s a tiny hint of lesbianism since she seems more interested in the Good Girl (Ruth) than any of the other characters. Although it’s pitched as “sisterly”, it feels more than that, but I don’t think Merritt could have got away with making it more overt and even having Ruth seemingly reciprocate.

Shadow also plays with some notions introduced in Burn Witch,Burn, in The Women of the Wood, and in the Ship of Ishtar. In all of these, the modern-day protagonist begins to take on the persona of what may have been a past life, mostly inimical to their own predilections (apart from in Ship, where the hero becomes a Conan-esque heroic figure). There is also the notion of how much of this is real, and how much is delusion. Shadow plays intriguingly with the idea – when Caranac thinks himself taking part on a terrible ritual sacrifice, he awakens the next day unsure of the reality of it. In another running theme of Merritt’s, the modern-day figures always try to explain away the uncanny elements of their encounters by “post-hypnotic suggestion”, “electromagnetism” and other vaguely scientific terms. Merritt is well-read enough in the scientific matters evidently in vogue that he manages to sound halfway plausible rather than technobabble.

In Women of the Wood, for example, the protagonist is resting in the Vosges with what we would now refer to as post-combat PTSD. He encounters a rough woodsman and his uncouth sons, waging a “war” against the forest that has ever encroached on their ancestral farmland. Our protagonist sees, or thinks he sees, forest spirits in place of the trees, the eponymous women, who plead with him to help. Merritt doesn’t quite make it as ambiguous as we’d like in whether the protagonist ends up committing murder on the basis of a delusion or not, but the suggestion is there nonetheless.

Shadow also revisits a theme from the generally pleasing Seven Footsteps to Satan. In this one, our protagonist ends up entwined in the schemes of a man calling himself Satan; a mysterious figure who collects fine art and interesting people, manipulating peoples’ live for his own amusement and making a loaded wager with them to indenture them as his servants. It’s great at the start, a little like John Fowles’ The Magus, but the ending is a little disappointing in that Satan seems to be less in control of matters than he was at the start, seemingly so that the plot would work. The victory doesn’t feel as earned as it could have been.

In Shadow, it is the figure of Keradal, the former lover of Mme Mandilip, who admits to playing games with Caranac, and in a great scene he offers up to Caranac two possibilities; either he really is a warlock capable of raising shadowy demonic creatures, or he is a skilled psychological manipulator capable of making Caranac think he’s been seeing shadowy demonic creatures. Either way is bad for Caranac.

There are a few fragments after this, of largely unfinished tales. Many of these revisit ideas about hallucination, where it is never entirely clear if the fantastic is real or in the imagination of the protagonists. The Fox Woman, for example, revisits the orientalism with which Merrit started (in The Dragon Glass), and is a tantalising glimpse at a tale of revenge. In Three Lines of Old French, an exhausted soldier in the trenches of WWI is given a glimpse of a beautiful dreamworld through the (rather cruel) hypnotic suggestion of a visiting doctor. Only in The Last Poet and the Robots do we get a departure from Merritt norms; this one is a little like Jack Vance, perhaps, or Fredric Brown, with a reclusive artist ending a robot uprising because the disturbance of all the fighting is annoying him.

Race. Again.

The notes on my Kindle collection warns of language considered racially charged by modern standards, so I braced myself for more Burroughs-style casual racism, or Lovecraft’s use of certain racial insults.

But, actually, it’s all pretty tame. Granted, there is a whiff of the Great White Saviour prevalent in all pulp fiction, and most of Merritt’s protagonists tend to be of Northern European descent, and most of the Lost World settings tend to involve blond-haired people ruling over shorter, darker people. But for that, these rulers are usually malignant, and the heroism come from the likes of the dark dwarfish people of Muria in The Moon Pool, or the pygmy folk of The Dwellers in the Mirage, as well as non-human folk like the frog folk of The Moon Pool, or Kon the Weaver, a kind of half-human, half-spider mutant, from The Face in the Abyss. Not to mention Dwellers in the Mirage features a heroic companion of Cherokee descent.

Where we do find some difficulty is in the use of out-dated adjectives like “yellow” and “slant-eyed” to describe the characters of East Asian heritage; a bit wince-inducing by modern standards but also probably not written with malice intended. One character in Seven Footsteps to Satan uses a racist epithet for Chinese people, but when it’s in the mouth of a character I’m inclined to let it go; if one was writing a story set in 1950s Alabama, it wouldn’t make sense for the racist sheriff character to refer to “people of colour”, and so for the sake of verisimilitude we should expect uncomfortable language where necessary.

But do the stories carry any underlying racist sense, like those of Burroughs and Howard do? No, not really. Merritt, for a writer of pulps in the early 20^th century, is pretty balanced – comments above about the Great White Saviour notwithstanding. Perhaps his wide travel as briefly mentioned in the biography made him more open-minded than many?

Inspirations and Influences

Taking the three suggested stories alone, the only thing I found in D&D that could have been drawn from Merritt was the undead monster, the Shadow. Perhaps the module I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City drew some inspiration from Merritt, although this was a later product written by Dave “Zeb” Cooke and not a Gygax product. The Lost World in a sunken valley echoes Dwellers in the MIrage, as does the name, and perhaps the man-frog Bullywugs are inspired by the frog-men Of The Moon Pool. Like the settings in both those stories, Forbidden City presents a kind of mini-sandbox setting, with various factions laid out but no clear adventure progression or objective unlike earlier adventure modules.

You could certainly use the pygmies of Dwellers as a variant halfling culture, the Cthulhu-esque Kh’ralku as a powerful antagonist, and the dinosaur-riding hunters of The Face in the Abyss as cool foes. There are some nice elements in Ship of Ishtar too – the King of Two Deaths (one quick for people willing to die, one slow for those who want to cling on to life) and the ziggurat of the various gods would be good to use. And although Witch and Shadow are set in 1930s New York, the antagonists, their schemes, and their magical murder methods could easily be incorporated into a fantasy campaign.

I liked Merritt, I found his works to largely have a pleasing depth beneath the Pulp veneer, especially the ones from the 30s.