The Face in the Abyss

Abraham Merritt The Face in the Abyss (1931)
It seems that Merritt was a big, big deal in his day, a name which dominated the fields of fantasy and science-fiction at the dawn of the pulp era before anyone had quite decided which was which or where to draw the line; and then he just went away, barely surviving as a footnote in popular terms. He significantly influenced both Lovecraft and Richard Shaver, but my own interest stems almost entirely from his influence on the work of Robert Moore Williams.

The Face in the Abyss is the first of Merritt's books I've even encountered on the shelves of a second-hand store, so naturally I snapped it up, although I suspect it probably wasn't the best place to start. The influence of H. Rider Haggard is tangible, so we have what feels a little like a more literary Edgar Rice Burroughs - intrepid explorers discovering lost civilisations full of dinosaurs and that sort of thing, embellished with occasional flourishes of sciencey ruminations.

The caverns of the face might be a laboratory of Nature, a crucible wherein, under unknown rays, transmutation of one element into another took place. Within the rock out of which the face was carved might be some substance which by these rays was transformed into gold. Fulfillment of that old dream… or inspiration… of the ancient alchemists which modern science is turning into reality. Had not Rutherford, the Englishman, succeeded in turning an entirely different element into pure copper by depriving it of an electron or two? Was not the final product of uranium, the vibrant mother of radium - dull, inert lead?

Yeah, I know - it still belongs to the special kind of ray school of technological speculation, but my point here is that this is essentially a fantasy novel wherein the magic is explicitly identified as advanced science.

The Face in the Abyss is otherwise very much of its time. Our hero learns of the lost gold of Atahualpa, setting off to find it in the inexplicable company of ruffians. Not a night seems to pass without one of them pulling a gun on the other three, tying them up, then delivering one of those hard boiled speeches about how he's known all along how they would turn out to be dirty, double-crossing rats, in light of which maybe he'll be keeping all the gold for himself, see? Of course, everyone is friends again next morning, having somehow risen above their little misunderstanding, at least until they encounter creatures which would almost certainly have been animated by Ray Harryhausen had this book ever been adapted for the big screen.

Merritt's prose has been generously described as florid, or as purple by less sympathetic critics. I fall somewhere between the two in holding that while his writing is ornate and often quite beautiful, a little goes a long way. Hoodlums aside, everyone in The Face in the Abyss speaks in what I have come to think of as Marvel Shakespearean, not quite the full my liege at the termination of every bleeding sentence, but certainly a lot of persons asking what say you, my friend?, and not a whole lot of chuckles to lighten the atmosphere of what begins to feel like one of the more portentous Ultravox records, thematically speaking.

I can see how Merritt's influence on Robert Moore Williams is at least as profound as that of A.E. van Vogt on Philip K. Dick, and I can see why he was popular for at least a couple of decades; and while this novel had a lot going for it, I unfortunately found it a bit of a trudge getting there.