The Moon Pool

A. Merritt

★★★☆☆

I don’t remember why I downloaded The Moon Pool when I first discovered Standard Ebooks and set about grabbing a bunch of books to read later (as one does). I finally got around to reading it.

The opening chapters are moody, creepy horror, set on and around an archaeological site at an isolated Pacific island. The locals refuse to stay during the nights of the full moon, and of course the white archaeologists want to know why, and find the secret door, and the hidden pool, and the horrific monster that comes forth in the moonlight and devours people’s souls.

Side note: the megalithic ruins of Nan Madol are real, though of course they were built by ordinary humans of the South Pacific a few centuries ago.

Once that tale is done, it shifts gears and becomes a hollow-earth adventure fantasy. (Apparently the book is a fix-up between a short story and its sequel, which explains the shift.) First with some party accretion on the high seas. Like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea there’s the professor, the manly man, and the third guy who’s there too. Then arrival at the site which turns out to be an entrance to a great underground empire (not that one). Frankly, the book gets tedious as the strangers from the surface get their tour. Lost civilization, some advanced technology, factions, wait, they worship the horrifying moon creature?

It picks up a bit after they get caught up in a sectarian conflict, and the revelation of how the Dweller / Shining One came into being is more interesting than I expected.

The whole thing is framed as a narrative included in a scientific report, which doesn’t really come into the storytelling much except when the narrator is talking about how some of the tech works, and the committee redacts it.

Changing Times

A few things stick out like sore thumbs:

1. The gigantic moon-sized hollow underneath the Pacific makes no sense. Scientists had speculated at the time that the Moon broke away from Earth, but have since figured out that any collision with enough energy to cause that would have melted both bodies enough that they’d re-shape themselves as spheres again. More like pulling a chunk of clay out of a ball and then shaping both chunks back into balls, only with gravity instead of your hands. OK, fine, it’s fantastic fiction, it’s just a jumping-off-point for a setting. Whatever.

2. The casual racism. It doesn’t reach the level of H.P. Lovecraft’s obsession with racial purity, but one of the protagonists specifically asks early on for white men to help, and the lost civilization is also specifically white (despite speaking a recognizably Polynesian language), and when Chinese and Pacific Islanders are mentioned at all, the phrasing is…not complimentary.

The connection to Irish mythology is actually kind of interesting, but since the hollow is literally on the opposite side of the globe from Ireland, it doesn’t make much sense.

3. The casual sexism. To be fair, the women from the archaeological dig turn out to be quite competent, they just get picked off in the first chapters. But of course there aren’t any women in the follow-up expedition, and the women of the underground world are all half-dressed (or less) for no particular reason, and the two major factions get boiled down to jealousy between the two priestesses who both lust after the manly hero guy. Or at least one lusts over him and the other conveniently falls in love with him at first sight.

According to both Standard Ebooks and Wikipedia, The Moon Pool was a significant entry in the lost-world genre, and specifically influenced Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos (with the drowned city of R’lyeh and the cosmic, ancient horror). (I also caught echoes of Disney’s Atlantis, of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, and ) But while some influential works are timeless, some, like this one, are very much stuck in their own time.