Writing
Merritt's writings were heavily influenced by H. Rider Haggard, Robert W. Chambers, and Gertrude Barrows Bennett (writing as Francis Stevens), with Merritt having "emulated Bennett's earlier style and themes." Merritt's stories typically revolve around conventional pulp magazine themes: lost civilizations, hideous monsters, etc. His heroes are gallant Irishmen or Scandinavians, his villains treacherous Germans or Russians and his heroines often virginal, mysterious and scantily clad.
What sets Merritt apart from the typical pulp author, however, is his lush, florid prose style and his exhaustive, at times exhausting, penchant for adjective-laden detail. Merritt's fondness for micro-description nicely complements the pointillistic style of Bok's illustrations.
In 1917, he published his first fantasy, "Through the Dragon Glass", in All-Story Weekly. This was followed by many more tales, including The People of the Pit (1918), The Moon Pool (1919), The Metal Monster (1920), The Face in the Abyss (1923), The Ship of Ishtar (1924), The Woman of the Wood (1926), Seven Footprints to Satan (1927), Burn Witch Burn! (1932), Dwellers in the Mirage (1932), Creep, Shadow! (1934), and The Drone Man (1934).
He also contributed to the round robin story The Challenge from Beyond with Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, and Frank Belknap Long.
The Fox Woman and the Blue Pagoda (1946) combined an unfinished story with a conclusion written by Merritt's friend Hannes Bok. The Fox Woman and Other Stories (1949) collected the same fragment, minus Bok's conclusion, with Merritt's short stories. The book The Black Wheel was published in 1948, after Merritt's death; it was written by Bok using previously unpublished material as well.
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“The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.”
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