Twins Madison and Mason Page have everything two kids could ever want, but they don't seem to appreciate any of it. One day, they dive into their luxurious swimming pool and surface in a very different place. They emerge into another town, long since abandoned. Trapped in this new world, they venture forth, finding evidence that the town's former residents must have suffered some sort of horrible fate before disappearing. Then it hits them. They have somehow been transported to the ghost town of Pripyat, which has stood empty since the local power station exploded many years earlier, a nuclear plant known as Chernobyl.

Twins Madison and Mason Page have everything two kids could ever want, but they don't seem to appreciate any of it. One day, they dive into their luxurious swimming pool and surface in a very different place. They emerge into another town, long since abandoned. Trapped in this new world, they venture forth, finding evidence that the town's former residents must have suffered some sort of horrible fate before disappearing. Then it hits them. They have somehow been transported to the ghost town of Pripyat, which has stood empty since the local power station exploded many years earlier, a nuclear plant known as Chernobyl.

Alex Anderson is nothing if not ordinary. He goes to school, plays baseball, hangs out with his friends, and loves his parents. His world is thrown into chaos when his aging great-grandmother starts referring to him as "David." What's most peculiar is how insistent she is that this is his name. At first, Alex dismisses it as another saddening example of her growing dementia. Then, while rummaging through the attic, he comes across a photo album he's never seen before. Inside, he finds photos of himself and his parents on a trip. What's strange is that he has no memory of it. Then he discovers something even stranger. The photographs were taken three years before he was born.

This early work by Abraham Grace Merritt was originally published in 1919 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Moon Pool' is a fantasy novel set on the island of Ponape amongst ruins of an ancient civilisation. It tells the tale of adventurous explorers who discover an unknown world. Abraham Grace Merritt - also known by his byline, A. Merritt - was born on the 20th January, 1884 in New Jersey, America. Merritt's stories typically revolved around conventional pulp magazine themes. His heroes are gallant Irishmen or Scandinavians, his villains treacherous Germans or Russians and his heroines often virginal, mysterious and scantily clad. Merritt married twice, once in the 1910s to Eleanore Ratcliffe, with whom he raised an adopted daughter, and again in the thirties to Eleanor H. Johnson.

Dr. David Throckmartin’s scientific expedition to the South Sea Islands discovers among ancient ruins a portal into Muria, an unknown underground world which is filled with fantastic and incredible beings, amazing scientific advances and the strange worship of an evil creature!

The Moon Pool, in novel form, is a combination and fix-up of two previously-published short stories: “The Moon Pool,” and “Conquest of the Moon Pool.” Initially serialized in All-Story Weekly, Merritt made the interesting choice of framing the novel as a sort of scientific retelling, going so far as to include footnotes from fictional scientists, to give this completely fantastic work an air of authenticity. In it we find the adventuresome botanist William T. Goodwin embarking on a quest to help his friend Throckmortin, whose wife and friends have fallen victim to a mysterious temple ruin on a remote South Pacific island. A series of coincidences provides Goodwin with a colorful cast of accompanying adventurers, and they soon find themselves in a mysterious futuristic underworld. The Moon Pool is an important entry in the Lost World genre, in no small part because it was a significant influence on H. P. Lovecraft—hints of The Moon Pool can be seen in his short story “The Call of Cthulhu,” and hints of Merritt’s Nan-Madol can be seen in Lovecraft’s R’lyeh. Today, The Moon Pool is a pulp classic, featuring many of the themes, tropes, and archetypes that characterized so many of the pulp adventure works of the era. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

"The Moon Pool" deals with an advanced race which has developed within the Earth's core. Eventually their most intelligent members create an offspring. This created entity encompasses both great good and great evil, but it slowly turns away from its creators and towards evil. The entity is called either the Dweller or the Shining One. "The Metal Monster" – Dr. Goodwin is on a botanical expedition in the Himalayas. There he meets Dick Drake, the son of one of his old science acquaintances. They are witnesses of a strange aurora-like effect, but seemingly a deliberate one. As they go out to investigate, they meet Goodwin's old friends Martin and Ruth Ventnor, brother and sister scientists. The group is saved from death in the mountains by a magnificent woman they get to know as Norhala. They are led to a hidden valley occupied by what they name "The Metal Monster", a strange metal city occupied by the metal animate Things Norhala commands. This city is governed by what they call the Metal Emperor, assisted by the Keeper of the Cones.