The People of the Pit and Other Stories

'The People of the Pit and Other Stories' is a collection of Abraham Merritt's short stories, and contains seven stories and two "fragments". These short stories span the entire career of the man who has been called America's foremost adventure fantasist of the 1920s and '30s. Several of the tales boast the lush purple prose of Merritt's early period (as seen especially in his first two novels, "The Moon Pool" and "The Metal Monster"), but all seven are finely written little gems. They run the gamut from full-blown fantasy to lost-world adventure to outright science fiction, and abundantly demonstrate that Merritt was a master of the concise short form, as well as the full-length novel.