About a week ago, Jake over at the PulpMortem Youtube channel uploaded a video review of A. Merritt’s Dwellers in the Mirage. I thought he did a good—but not perfect—job. So, I thought it would be helpful and informative to do a friendly fact-check of/reaction to his episode. Check out the video below to follow along at home.

Jake starts out by doing a review of 'Dwellers' covers through the decades. I generally agree with his assessments but the 1967 Rosa cover is definitely not the worst. I might have to do a post on that.

He also brings attention to the fact that A. Merritt is 'underrated' in these decadent and subliterate days. I wholeheartedly agree. That goes back a long way and almost appears to have been coordinated. Up until his death in 1943, Ol' Abe was lauded by the likes of The New York Times, Max Brand and Clark Ashton Smith. He was idolized by budding authors such as Jack Williamson, C.L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Edmond Hamilton and Ray Bradbury.

Merritt's corpse was barely cold before ankle-biting second-rate critics like Damon Knight and James Blish showed up to attack his literary legacy. From then on, it was uncool to like Merritt in hipster/nerdboy SFF circles. That didn't stop the likes of Michael Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner and Keith Taylor from enjoying his fiction and being inspired thereby.

Next, Jake mentions authors and fictional characters that Merritt influenced. He brings up Roger Zelazny and Corwin from the 'Amber' series. I think he gets this from one paragraph in my afterword to the DMR Books edition. However, in that essay, I'm careful to point out that Zelazny cited Kuttner's The Dark World as an inspiration for the 'Amber' series. Kuttner was a huge fan of Merritt--as was his wife, C.L. Moore. The Dark World employs the same 'man with two souls' trope basically invented by Merritt in 'Dwellers'. However, in my opinion, another Kuttner story--and also a tale by Edmond Hamilton--matches up far more closely with what we actually see in the 'Amber' novels, especially Nine Princes in Amber. If Jake knows of a quote from Zelazny directly praising Merritt, I would love to see it. I don't say that to be catty or passive-aggressive. I would sincerely love to see it.

Right after that, Jake states that Merritt and 'Dwellers' inspired Leigh Brackett's Eric John Stark. It's way more complicated than that. Brackett was a big Merritt fan, just like C.L. Moore. Moore's Northwest Smith seems to have been a model--to a certain extent--for Brackett's Eric John Stark. Other inspirations would appear to be Burroughs' Tarzan and REH's Conan. In my essay, I noted some 'Dwellers' influence on Brackett's 'The Book of Skaith'/Stark novels, but those were toward the end of her career. Where the 'Dwellers' influence really shows up is in Brackett's early classic novel, The Sword of Rhiannon, where the protagonist is Matt Carse. Once again, I'm not slamming Jake on this; I'm just setting the record straight.

Jake then moves on to Merritt's prose. I was gratified to hear him describe some of it as "shockingly violent". Merritt--like, to a lesser extent, his fan, Robert E. Howard--was from the 'iron fist in a velvet glove' school. Sure, you could have extravagant prose describing a landscape or a woman, but when things got real--Abe kept it real. Let the skulls crunch and the blood flow.

At about 13:00, Jake mentions that he has a problem with "fantasy names". The 'problem' here is that the names he cites are authentic Cherokee/Tsalagi. A. Merritt actually told Argosy readers about how he read scholarly journal articles on the Cherokee to research this novel. Among the names Jake cites is the Tsalagi name for Jim Two-Eagles, Leif Langdon's best friend. What was Merritt supposed to do? A big part of the novel is predicated on Tsalagi-speakers settling in the Valley of the Mirage. 'Anglicizing' Tsalagi names would've been almost impossible.

From there on out, I think Jake does fine. I profoundly appreciate him 'boosting the signal' in regard to A. Merritt and Dwellers in the Mirage. He's never claimed to be a life-long fan/scholar of A. Merritt. Within those parameters, he did far better than almost any vlogger I know of.

The PulpMortem website can be found here. I also recommend Jake’s entertaining clip on DAW Books, which can be found here. DMR Books' definitive edition of The Dwellers in the Mirage can be found here and here.