A. Merritt - The Fox Woman & Other Stories (1949)

Just for the sake of a recap in the event of your having forgotten who he was - which is understandable given that most of us apparently have - if you're into the weird stuff, then Merritt was probably your favourite author's favourite author. He collaborated with Lovecraft and was a legend in his own lifetime, but a legend which faded with surprising haste, possibly due to the popularity of the sort of thing he wrote having likewise faded. It was fantasy, often drawing on myth and legend but from a twentieth century perspective, and with the influence of H. Rider Haggard very much in evidence. Merritt made a name for himself in the genre with unusually baroque prose which might have verged on the purple had he not applied it with such elegance.

That said, a little sometimes went a long way with Merritt, with the most loquacious application of bon mots suffocating the narrative in ebullient flourishes of topaz more languid than even the silken robes of Lao-Tzu as he rises to greet the crimson morn etc. etc., and his characters can be occasionally somewhat stereotypical. When everything's working as it should, this isn't a problem, but they can't all be classics. Actually, for all those of his books which I've read have going for them, I'm not convinced any of them are truly classics; and I'm not sure about this lot either.

The Fox Woman itself is a mostly elegant excursion into Chinese mythology which surely didn't need to be fifty pages; and perhaps may not have been in an ideal world, given that it's an unfinished piece published posthumously, along with a couple of other sketchy fragments featured here. Three Lines of Old French is one of those deals where some saucy bint you meet in a dream sends you a letter through the actual real world postal system, and it features a line describing military casualties as dregs of a score of carryings to the red-wine press of war, which is probably overdoing it a bit. Two of the stories are related by groups of chaps sat smoking cigars by the fireside, each consecutively out-doing the previous guy's tale of strange animal transformations, concluding with some bloke turning into a bee. You really get the impression that it was written in full confidence of this expression being welded firmly onto the reader's face for the duration.

In Merritt's favour, the ideas are nice and the imagery is often vivid even where they amount to less than the sum of the parts. Through the Dragon Glass and The Women of the Wood are decent, as is The Last Poet and the Robots which succeeds if only through the sheer force of its own weirdness, notably seeming very much a potential precursor to Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time. So that's a thumbs up even if I seem to be pulling a face.