One of the most gripping fantasies ever written, The Moon Pool embodies all the romanticism and poetic nostalgia characteristic of A. Merritt's writings. Set on the island of Ponape, full of ruins from ancient civilizations, the novel chronicles the adventures of a party of explorers who discover a previously unknown underground world full of strange peoples and super-scientific wonders. From the depths of this world, the party unwittingly unleashes the Dweller, a monstrous terror that threatens the islands of the South Pacific. Although Merritt did not invent the lost world novel, following in the footsteps of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Burroughs and others, he greatly elaborated upon that tradition. This new edition includes a biography of the author, and an introduction detailing Merritt's many sources and influences, including the occult, mythological, and scientific discourses of his day.

This early work by Abraham Grace Merritt was originally published in 1920 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Metal Monster' is a fantasy novel about Dr. Goodwin's travels in the Himalayas and the mysterious metal beings he encounters there. 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.

North Dakota is like nowhere Colleen has ever seen. Vast plains of silver snow, studded with shimmering black pools, lit by flares of orange light. This is the landscape that swallowed her son. Across town, another mother also searches for her missing boy. He too disappeared from the oilfields where he worked. And no-one seems to care that he is gone. These two women must work together to find their sons. But what they discover might destroy them both...

The Moon Pool (1918) is a novel by A. Merritt. Originally published as a pair of short stories in the Argosy All-Story Weekly, Merritt’s novel is an influential work in the tradition of lost world fantasy, a subgenre pioneered by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Arthur Conan Doyle. Thought to have influenced H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” The Moon Pool is widely regarded as Merritt’s finest work. “Now the Thing was close to the end of the white path; close up to the barrier of darkness still between the ship and the sparkling head of the moon stream. Now it beat up against that barrier as a bird against the bars of its cage. It whirled with shimmering plumes, with swirls of lacy light, with spirals of living vapour.” While on a seafaring expedition, Dr. Goodwin, a brilliant scientist, first makes contact with a being known to some as the Dweller, and to others as the Shining One. Created by a lost race residing in the Earth’s core, the Dweller soon broke free from its masters and took on a capacity for evil. Now, all that remains of the once vibrant and advanced underground civilization are the three Silent Ones, wise and immortal beings whose duty—if they can fulfill it—is to destroy the Dweller once and for all. Joined by pilot Larry O’Keefe, Dr. Goodwin voyages underground to learn more about the creature he first saw by the light of the moon. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool is a classic of American fantasy fiction reimagined for modern readers.

“This is not a novel about a woman leaving home but rather about a human being finding her way back.”—Chicago Tribune In the middle of her life, Nan decides to leave her husband at home and begin an impromptu trek across the country, carrying with her a turquoise leather journal she intends to fill. The Pull of the Moon is a novel about a woman coming to terms with issues of importance to all women. In her journal, Nan addresses the thorniness—and the allure—of marriage, the sweet ties to children, and the gifts and lessons that come from random encounters with strangers, including a handsome man appearing out of the woods and a lonely housewife sitting on her front porch steps. Most of all, Nan writes about the need for the self to stay alive. In this luminous and exquisitely written novel, Elizabeth Berg shows how sometimes you have to leave your life behind in order to find it. the pull of the moon BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Elizabeth Berg's Once Upon a Time, There Was You. Praise for The Pull of the Moon “Breathtaking . . . [Berg] writes with wry wit and aching lyricism, painting her characters as vividly as anyone writing today.”—The Charlotte Observer “When was the last time you thought about running away? . . . In The Pull of the Moon, Berg shares her strength, the wonderful widening of her soul so that we, too, can take the journey in the ease of our chair.”—Greensboro News & Record “Berg’s gift as a storyteller lies most powerfully in her ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, the remarkable in the everyday.”—The Boston Globe “Reading The Pull of the Moon is like sitting down for a long, satisfying chat with a best girlfriend. . . . [It] pleasantly encourages readers to recover a little life-embracing enthusiasm themselves.”—Orlando Sentinel

Reproduction of the original.

Former NASA Astronaut Harrison Schmitt advocates a private, investor-based approach to returning humans to the Moon—to extract Helium 3 for energy production, to use the Moon as a platform for science and manufacturing, and to establish permanent human colonies there in a kind of stepping stone community on the way to deeper space. With governments playing a supporting role—just as they have in the development of modern commercial aeronautics and agricultural production—Schmitt believes that a fundamentally private enterprise is the only type of organization capable of sustaining such an effort and, eventually, even making it pay off.