Abraham Merritt’s THE MOON POOL first appeared as an open-ended short story, followed by a novel that concluded the story, both of which were printed in ALL-STORY
WEEKLY. This fantasy-drenched "lost race" tale was largely responsible for the author’s meteoric rise to
fame for a relatively small number of fantasy-novels. Because the
revised novel was a “fix-up” of two related stories, close
analysis shows some problems with overall tone, though in the end
Merritt manages to bring the sections together in terms of his
dominant myth: that of modern man being ravished by elder mysteries.
The short story, the first work to
carry the title “The Moon Pool,” is narrated by a botanist,
Walter Goodwin, who journeys to Polynesia to gather information for a
book in his field. Goodwin meets a colleague, Throckmartin, who
within the last year journeyed to the same area for his own research.
Twice in the novel Merritt draws attention to Throckmartin having
been accompanied by his “youthful” wife and an “equally
youthful” junior collaborator, and in so doing, the author manages
to suggest some extra-marital impropriety, with the older man made to
wear the cuckold horns.
But although Goodwin perceives that
Throckmartin has become “one who had borne some searing shock of
rapture and horror,” the older man’s catastrophe has nothing to
do with sexual betrayal as such. Throckmartin’s research party
encountered a transcendent, godlike entity known as “the Dweller,”
who manifested in a “moon pool” located within ancient ruins. The
Dweller then spirited away everyone but the older man, leaving
Throckmartin traumatized by the experience. Goodwin does not know
what to make of his colleague’s story, or the fact that
Throckmartin has a strange brand on his chest, one which seems hard
as stone. As if anxious to prove the truth of Throckmartin’s claim
to Goodwin, the Dweller manifests, this time spiriting Throckmartin
away as well, leaving Goodwin to ponder his weird encounter with
something that seems both of Heaven and of Hell.
In the novel-sequel, originally
titled “The Conquest of the Moon Pool,” Goodwin speedily puts
together a rescue-party to probe the ruins of Nan-Tauach, which seems
to suggest construction by ancient builders with great technological
prowess. On his way Goodwin picks up three other investigators. One
is a Norwegian sailor, Olaf, whose wife and daughter were also
spirited away by the mysterious Dweller. The second is Larry O’Keefe,
an Irish-American pilot whose “hydroairplane” was knocked out of
the sky by a cyclone, forcing him to drift on the sea-waves until
being rescued. The third is Marakinoff, a Russian provocateur
conducting his own one-man investigation, who infiltrates Goodwin’s
expedition but proves to be a general troublemaker. The four of them
investigate a strange “moon door” in the ruins, and pass through
it, leaving behind the rest of the rescue party.
The door apparently transports the
travelers through time and/or space, for they find themselves in a
strange civilization, utterly isolated from the modern world and
possessed of a formidable super-science, including disintegrator
weapons. This civilization, run by a privileged class called
“ladalas,” also worships an energy-entity called “the Shining
One,” who happens to be identical with the Dweller witnessed by
Goodwin. The women of Nan-Tauach are all beautiful elf-women, but the
men tend to be short and almost dwarfish (perhaps owing something to
the tropes used in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Opar” stories).
O”Keefe instantly falls in love with the first woman he sees,
despite the fact she’s got a humanoid frog in her company, but the
woman, name of Lakla, disappears from sight and from several chapters
thereafter.
The modern-day quartet then get
introduced to the hidden city’s wonders by the high priestess of
the Shining One: Yolara, a cruel-looking beauty. This character
continues Merritt’s theme of uniting rapture and horror, since
Goodwin refers to her as “a queen of hell and a princess of
heaven—in one.” However, unlike the virginal Lakla, Yolara’s
been around, and has apparently enjoyed as her lover one of the dwarf-men, Lugur (whose name, incidentally, resembles that of the mythic villain Loki, whom the Norwegian Olaf thinks responsible for all of his suffering). Lugur is less than pleased with the outer-world
visitors when Yolara begins pursuing O’Keefe, and such is the
priestess’s beauty that O’Keefe does come close to forgetting all
about the story’s “good girl.” In this development one sees
Merritt morphing the suggested theme of the short tale—two men in
conflict over a woman—into one involving two women fighting over a
man.
The outworlders get to witness a
summoning of the Shining One, who pulls sacrificial victims into his
own world, where it feeds off their energies. Later Goodwin and
company will learn that both Throckmartin’s group and Olaf’s
relations exist in a “dead-alive” state from which they never
return. Marakinoff makes common cause with Lugur and largely departs
the main storyline, implicitly contributing to evil plot-hatching.
Yolara drugs O’Keefe in order to make him marry her, but Lakla
finally shows up, and reveals to the reader that she’s the
priestess of another group of ethereal entities, “the Three Silent
Ones,” and she upsets Yolara’s plans. However, the things that
Yolara has learned from O’Keefe inspire her to follow the example
of Rider Haggard’s famed villainess She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. She
plans to unleashing her super-scientific weapons, as well as the
Dweller, upon the modern world. Goodwin pictures the entire world
being reduced to “a ruined planet” by the seemingly unstoppable
power of the Shining One.
Some “lost city” stories place the
heroes in the position of bringing down a corrupt hierarchy of
“haves” in order to liberate the “have nots.” This theme is
minimally suggested in MOON POOL, but Merritt doesn’t pursue it,
and indeed, none of the characters in Nan-Tauach are strongly drawn
except for Yolara, Lugur, and Rador, a dwarf-man who allies himself
to the travelers. The travelers are no better. Goodwin is a colorless
scientific theorizer. Marakinoff is a standard Russian schemer, and
Olaf is a standard Nordic berserker. As for Larry O’Keefe, he’s
positioned as the story’s male romantic lead, but he’s certainly
no Leo Vincey. Indeed, O’Keefe may be the crappiest hero ever to
bring down a lost city. At heart O’Keefe is a standard Irish
stereotype, just as Olaf is a standard Nordic stereotype. But because
O’Keefe’s entire being is made up of banshees and blarney stones,
he seems like a blathering blockhead rather than an admirable heroic
figure. Merritt gives O’Keefe a loopy way of speaking,
interspersing his words with exclamations of “Yip” and “Yow,”
and he wearies both Goodwin and most readers by stubbornly insisting
that the Irish “little people” are real but that scientific
speculation is all ‘superstition.”
Thus none of the characters from
modern-day Earth are anything but useful props for the author. Lakla
the good girl and Lugur the spurned lover are equally flat. Because
Merritt expends a lot of effort delineating the charms of Yolara’s
cruel beauty, I was tempted to see her as the novel’s “starring
villainess,” a deliberate parallel to Haggard’s SHE. But though
Yolara dominates the middle third of the book, she fades in
importance with respect to the revelations of the novel’s final
chapters, detailing what the Shining One is, and how it was brought
into being by the endeavors of the Three Silent Ones. By this I make
the determination that the Shining One, rather than any of the humans
fighting for or against it, is the focal presence of the novel.
Though that history posits that the
city of Nan-Tauach pre-existed the coming of the Shining
One—implicitly, as a survival of the even more archaic continent
Lemuria—in a symbolic sense the sinister beauties of the ancient
city is one with the fallen nature of the Shining One. Everything in
the city, like the Shining One, is depicted as a series of
prismatically-colored, lapidary beauty, but it’s a beauty like that
of the Gorgon (to which Yolara is often compared). Author Merritt
takes great pleasure in describing the interfusion of loveliness and
wickedness, of heaven and hell, and in future novels he develops this
trope to greater effect. Here, however, he fudges his own aesthetic
somewhat by using dull sticks like Lakla and O’Keeffe as his
romantic pair. Some theorists have argued that H.P. Lovecraft’s
concepts of his “Great Old Ones” may owe something to the
amorphous beauty of the Shining One. But if Lovecraft read THE MOON
POOL, I imagine him being dismayed by the novel’s resolution: that
of having the monster-god weakened by the love-feeling of hero and
heroine, prior to its being destroyed by its creators.
Appropriately, though, Merritt does
bring the novel full circle by having Goodwin exiled from the land of
wonder as was Throckmartin. Oddly, the vehicle of this exile is
Marakinoff, who attacks Goodwin on a bridge to prevent his Western
rival for enjoying the fruits of his research. In the fall the
Russian dies and Goodwin returns to the mortal world. He’s unable
to access the Moon Pool again, but gets another shot at delving into
worlds of wonder in a follow-up novel, THE METAL MONSTER.
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