A. Merritt's The Fox Woman and Other Stories

The Fox Woman and Other Stories collects the shorter fiction of Abraham Merritt (whose work was always published under the byline A. Merritt). The stories were written between 1917 and 1948.

Merritt wrote one of the all-time great fantasy novels, The Ship of Ishtar, as well as some of the greatest of all lost world stories.

The novelette Fox Woman (from 1946) is set in China. The bandits who killed her husband are on the trail of a woman. She sees no hope of escape. She is about to flee up the stairway to a temple when she sees a fox. She doesn’t know why, perhaps she is simply mad with fear, but she asks the fox to help her. She desires only revenge. The fox vanishes. Then she sees a beautiful woman. Unaccountably the bandits turn on each other.


She is taken in by an old priest. And by the foxes. They are of course fox spirits. She gives birth to her child. And perhaps she will have her revenge.

Fox spirits are a major and fascinating feature of Chinese folklore and I love any story in which they are involved. An excellent tale.

In The People of the Pit (dating from 1917) a couple of gold prospectors in the Yukon see a strange light playing on the face of a mountain. Suddenly a man appears, horribly injured, and he tells them a story of terror. There is a vast pit within the mountain, but the inhabitants are far from human.

There have been many tales of mirrors as portals into other worlds but Through the The Dragon Glass, written in 1917, is certainly an early example, and a very good one. It relies mainly on a nicely disturbing atmosphere of decadence and obsession.

The Drone (dating from 1934) concerns shape-changers. Werewolves and fox-women and so forth. A group of explorers who have seen many strange things in many strange lands recount things they have seen. Perhaps physical shape-changing, or perhaps not physical. An interesting story.

The Last Poet and the Robots (written in 1934) is set in the very distant future. Narodny is a great scientist but he cares more about poetry and music than science. He does not hate humanity. He is merely indifferent. He has constructed a vast underground world, a world of beauty and poetry and song. But now he will have to stir himself to confront a deadly threat. Which means he will have to deal with the robots. Good story with strong hints of decadence.

Three Lines of Old French (from 1919) deals with a theme that obviously obsessed Merritt - the blurred boundary between reality and the life of the mind. In the First World War a soldier has a dream, or maybe a vision, or maybe it really happened. Maybe the true reality lies in our subconscious or our dreams.

The Women of the Wood dates from 1934. On the opposite shore of a lake a man sees something odd. There’s a forest. A wood cutter and his sons are chopping down the trees. Then it’s almost as if one of the sons is deliberately struck by an overhanging branch. The woodcutters hate the forest in a way that seems bizarre and irrational.

And then the narrator enters the forest. He gets the impression the trees are not just alive but conscious. It’s as if they’re tree-women. They want his help. He feels compelled to help them, although he is horrified by their request. Of course it might all be his over-active imagination. Or perhaps not. A story with a wonderful sense of magic, or at least of an almost magical quasi-mystical atmosphere. A great story.

The White Road and When Old Gods Wake are fragments of novels that were never written.

A superb and varied collection and a must-read for fans of weird fiction.

I’ve also reviewed Merritt’s The Face in the Abyss.