Dwellers in the Mirage

 

Abraham Merritt Dwellers in the Mirage (1932)
This is my third Merritt, and possibly my last depending upon how charitable I'm feeling should I happen across any of the remaining five in a used book store. While there's much to recommend Abe, of those I've read, this is the third of his novels to feature what is more or less the same story which, in case you can't be arsed to skip back to September, I've already summarised thus:

...belonging very much to the genre inhabited by Conan Doyle's Lost World, much of what was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and particularly H. Rider Haggard's She, which I gather substantially influenced Merritt; thus we have scientific blokes who venture forth and discover a lost civilisation of some description, consequently resulting in thrills, scrapes, and at least one of their number copping off with a lady in a metallic bra.

 

As with both The Moon Pool and The Face in the Abyss, Dwellers in the Mirage gets off to a frankly astonishing start before settling into a hundred or so pages of people running around with swords, and people who seem to have crept into the book while you weren't looking so it's anyone's guess who the hell they're supposed to be.

Merritt writes beautifully, like a grown man version of that to which Lovecraft aspired but never really quite achieved. His characters are fascinating and the set ups and situations into which they stumble are genuinely bizarre, and additionally spiced by the author pulling off some fairly detailed and hence plausible scientific explanations for the weirder aspects of his tale. Here we have a man who finds himself sharing a body with the personality of some mythic warrior from antiquity, and who then discovers a lost civilisation of pygmies living beneath a remote lake, except what appears to be a lake is actually some peculiar atmospheric effect concealing a Carboniferous landscape. The first half reads a little like Asimov turning his hand to sword and what may resemble sorcery but is actually a perfectly logical scientific phenomenon.

And I reflected, now, that science and religion are really blood brothers, which is largely why they hate each other so, that scientists and religionists are quite alike in their dogmatism, their intolerance, and that every bitter battle of religion over some interpretation of creed or cult has its parallel in battles of science over a bone or rock.

Unfortunately, the second half seems to be grunting fights, and I lost track of who was fighting who or how it started. In fact our man seems to have switched sides at some point, and I still have no idea why, or who Dara was supposed to be, so it became quickly exhausting. This is a shame because Merritt's Khalk'ru is essentially Lovecraft's Cthulhu written by a man with a solid understanding of physics and who isn't crippled by a pathological fear of foreigners.

Bugger. There's so much that's good about this one that maybe I should give him another chance. I guess we'll have to see.