Who Goes There?

A couple years ago I was supposed to review A. Merritt’s novel The Dwellers in the Mirage, although I couldn’t get far into it before admitting defeat. It could be because I was reading it as it appeared in Fantastic Novels, a magazine with a type size intended for ants and other insects, but I was struggling with it. At the time I knew I would have to give Merritt another shot at some point, not least because of his reputation in the field—or, more accurately, his lack of a reputation nowadays. Abraham Merritt only wrote eight novels and small number of short stories, which for someone who wrote pulp fiction is borderline miniscule, but in fact he had such a well-paying day job that he felt not the need to write much fiction. He worked as assistant editor and later editor of The American Weekly, a Sunday newspaper whose top positions paid a pretty good deal. (Making it as a journalist a century ago meant a lot more than it does now, in the sense that you could afford a house without taking on a second job.) Merritt basically quit writing fiction after 1934 to focus on his lucrative career, resulting in a writing career that lasted not quite twenty years. As with close contemporary Edgar Rice Burroughs, Merritt didn’t start writing fiction until he was in his thirties; but once he picked it up, he found a good deal of success with it as well. Merritt cultivated such a devoted following that he’s one of a very small group of people to have a genre magazine named after him, the short-lived A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine.

Yet Merritt’s reputation dwindled in the years following his death in 1943, with naysayers popping up rather early on. In one of his books of criticism, I forget which piece exactly, James Blish calls Merritt a lousy writer. While such an assessment is more often true than not when it comes to once-beloved genre writers from so long ago (E. E. Smith was indeed a pretty bad writer, and his immense influence on the field is thus hard to account for), this judgment of Merritt seems harsh to me. It’s telling that Merritt was one of the first people to be inducted posthumously into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, then was “awarded” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award in 2009. His stuff only seems to be kept in print by small independent presses, and I’m actually unsure if even all his novels are in print. He also wrote few short stories, with “The Woman of the Wood” being his only original appearance in Weird Tales. Merritt’s work was frequently reprinted in the genre magazines of the time, but he was originally published in the general pulps, namely Argosy.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales, and later reprinted in the January 1934 issue. It’s also been reprinted in the first issue of Avon Fantasy Reader, A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (ed. Terry Carr and Martin H. Greenberg), The Fantasy Hall of Fame (ed. Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg), and the Merritt collection The Fox Woman and Other Stories. It’s in the public domain now, which means you can read it however, although it’s not been transcribed for Project Gutenberg in the US as of yet. Very little of Merritt’s public-domain work is there.

Enhancing Image

McKay, an American World War I veteran, has come to the mountains of France in need of some fresh air. A pilot in the war, McKay had apparently joined the French forces and later the Americans, once they entered the war; but while he served honorably, the experience left him shell-shocked. “The war had sapped him, nerve and brain and soul. Through all the years that had passed since then the wound had kept open.” This is, of course, Merritt telling us upfront that we ought to take McKay’s testimony of the strange events to follow with a grain of salt. Indeed, McKay not entirely having his mental screws in place is key to the story working, or else it would sound even more ridiculous than it already does. McKay is quite different from his creator, being a war veteran while Merritt was not, but both men are what we might call eccentrics, and both also have green thumbs. McKay would be perfectly happy as a gardener, such that he seems to get along better with plants than people, and like Bob Ross he has a tendency to bestow human personality on the birch and pine trees of the Vosages. He’s staying at a lodge, owned by an unnamed inn-keeper and his wife, on the edge of a lake, with only one other human habitation at that forested lake—that being the house of Polleau and his two sons.

Polleau and his sons are the descendants of serfs who lived off the land generations ago, but they’ve been feuding with their surroundings such that several members of their family have befallen to bizarre tree-related accidents. Now they are the last of their kind. Given that McKay repeatedly equate the trees with royalty and medieval figures, it’s easy to picture the last of the serfs going up against a legion of nobility (or so Merritt/McKay thinks) from centuries past, in a France which has not had a monarch for many years at this point. When one of the sons tries cutting down a birch (the birch trees are given feminine qualities), McKay witnesses something very strange indeed: the trees seem to fight back. The birch, wounded, lies on a neighboring fir “as though it were a wounded maid stretched on breast, in arms, of knightly lover.” Something I’ll say in Merritt’s favor is that while he’s fond of using certain words over and over, he has a knack for evocative imagery that’s a step above most other people submitting to Weird Tales at the time. The cast is small, and it become apparent pretty soon where Merritt is gonna take the plot, but the setting is well-realized, and there’s an intense earthiness to it that reads like a pulpier and perhaps less scary Algernon Blackwood. I have no doubt that Merritt would’ve read his fair share of Blackwood, considering he was big into reading on the occult and both authors have a shared fondness for rural spaces. “The Woman of the Wood” was by no means the first “Nature fights back” story, probably not even the first to be published in Weird Tales that year, but it’s redeemed by Merritt’s knack for setting and tone.

One of the sons lose an eye in the ordeal, which was a bit more violent than I was expecting, but also it’s unsurprising that a) this conflict between man and tree is a bit more literal than would be deemed realistic, and b) McKay sympathizes a lot more with the trees. Later he is tormented, or maybe just haunted, by a small army of birches come to life as ghostly women, which is how I imagine we got the cover for this magazine issue. The trees tempt McKay to “slay” (they keep using that word specifically for a while, which makes the proceedings just a bit hard to take seriously) the Polleau family for them. Since the closest we have to a human woman in the story is the inn-keeper’s wife, who doesn’t say much, the estrogen quota will have to be met in the form of sly and vaguely slutty tree spirits. The spirits of the forest are not exactly evil, nor are they really good, but simply wanting to retaliate against a small but passionate force of deforestation. It does not seem to occur to anyone, even Polleau himelf, that the old man and his sons should probably make plans to move out of the mountains; but then, considering what we see of them, it wouldn’t be surprising that their pride would make moving out of the question. As is typical of weird fiction, and also pulp writing generally at the time, there’s an appeal more to emotions than the brain. That Merritt can delay the reader in thinking about the logical issues of the setting is to the story’s benefit, not really a negative. That McKay himself is shown to be in a fragile mental state to begin with also makes his extreme actions in the climax easier to understand.

There Be Spoilers Here

The really crazy part, which might be the one thing I wasn’t expecting in terms of the story itself (putting style and pacing aside), is that McKay gets away with murder. Yeah, he shivs one of the sons in the goddamn neck, in a kind of tree-induced rage, actually rips out the guy’s throat with the knife (it should be sliced instead of ripped if it’s with a blade, but putting that aside…), and it’s pretty graphic. It’s about as graphic as you could get away with in a dark fantasy magazine with a lot of naked women on its covers in the 1920s. And what’s more, the trees kill Polleau and the other son off-screen, giving McKay enough leeway to get off scott free. The trees don’t even take vengeance on him when he turns down their offer to join them (I assume by giving up his human body to become a tree spirit, I’m not sure), they just seem a little crestfallen about it. But yeah, aside from being shaken from killing a guy and making contact with a bunch of ghosts, McKay gets out of this in one piece. Didn’t expect that.

A Step Farther Out

Merritt’s known more for his novels (not that he’s known much at all these days), but I’m more of a short story fan myself. Why he didn’t contribute more to Weird Tales, I’m not sure. Maybe the pay rate wasn’t enough. At least with Amazing Stories in the late ’20s, Merritt’s lack of original appearances (although he did give the green light on a few reprints) can be explained by Hugo Gernsback being reluctant to pay anybody much of anything. By the time more rivals to Weird Tales, and indeed more genre alternatives to the general pulps, came about, Merritt stopped writing, and then he died about a decade later. It’s a bit of a shame, because it turns out he wasn’t half bad at writing short fiction. “The Woman of the Wood” is a decent bit of rural weird horror that’s aged better than most from the same period, namely due to Merritt’s style plus the lack of racism.

See you next time.