Burn, Witch, Burn by A. Merritt

[timothymayer]

Review here:
z7hq.blogspot.com/2010/01/burn-witch-burn-1932-by-merritt.html

[Johnlprobert]

Burn, Witch, Burn!

Abraham Merritt 1932

Fun paperback version published by Orbit Books 1974

(The paperback I read has the most crackingly psychedelic cover if anyone possesses the ability to find a scan!)

A few weeks ago at Probert Towers Lady P and I watched The Devil Doll (1936), Tod Browning’s tale of cross-dressing Devil’s Island-escaping overacting Lionel Barrymore’s attempts to shrink lovely ladies down to tiny size to act as miniature assassins and bump off the men who caused him to be imprisoned in the first place. The basic plot was so mental that I wondered if the source novel, a copy of which I picked up from Oxfam some time last year, might really be as weird as the film.

Sadly, it isn’t. Not that ‘Burn, Witch, Burn!’ isn’t a good pulp novel because it is. I’d disagree with the comment in the review the link above leads you to about Merritt being verbose. In fact his prose is as stripped down as Joseph Payne Brennan, and this novel is a very brisk read indeed. What’s interesting is to find that Hollywood’s technique of taking merely an idea from a novel and constructing a whole new story around it is nothing new. In the novel, Madame Mandelip, far from being the cuddly transvestite Lionel Barrymore of the movie, is in fact just an evil ugly old woman with enormous breasts (Merritt’s description, not mine). As the witch of the title (and I do think that IS a great title) she fashions dolls in the likeness of anyone who happens to wander into her shop. As the individual concerned starts to die so the doll starts to live. Madame Mandelip seems to use these dolls for nothing other than to kill the people who have found out she makes the dolls, which seems to be a bit of a self-perpetuating conundrum but there we are. It’s probably the only novel I’ve read where the heroes are a doctor and a bunch of gangsters, but that makes it fun too. In fact I’d certainly recommend this as a very good (and certainly very well written) example of 1930s pulp. And if nothing else Merritt has the whole story lead up to a climactic image that really is to die for, with Madame Mandelip transforming into a gorgeous naked witch surrounded by her evil dolls before the cavalry arrive to give everything and everyone a bloody good kicking.

[dem bones]

Thanks, Lord P., a happening Merritt thread is long overdue. I read this not long before we started the board, hence everyone was spared a review and I can just quietly agree with you that this is a top pulp romp. Orbit really went for it with him, reprinting The Face In The Abyss and Dwellers In The Mirage (Octopus God seeks human sacrifices) with matching freak-out artwork before being gobbled up by ( I think?) Futura. My favourite single work of his is the novella, The Women Of The Wood, turned down by Argosy as "plot-less", submitted to Weird Tales where, according to Sam Moskowitz, "it proved the most popular story in the star-studded history of that magazine". Yet more additions to the never ending to read/ re-read pile then ...

[Jojo Lapin X]

This could get very interesting. Recent member "knygathin" has stated elsewhere that THE METAL MONSTER is the best book he ever read in his life. And he never jokes.

[Johnlprobert]

Sept 6, 2010 15:15:26 GMT dem bones said:

Orbit really went for it with him, reprinting The Face In The Abyss and Dwellers In The Mirage (Octopus God seeks human sacrifices) with matching freak-out artwork before being gobbled up by ( i think?) Futura.

They also brought out Merritt's Seven Footprints to Satan (with psychedelic cover) which is on the Probert Towers shelf for a rainy Sunday.

[dem bones]

The Women Of The Wood was exhumed for Alden H. Norton & Sam Moskowitz's Masters Of Horror - the proper horror artwork on cover compensates for some too familiar selections, as does Merritt's masterpiece which is ..... imagine Algernon Blackwood with a full-on pulp makeover and you're getting there. Merrit didn't have too many short stories published in his lifetime, but those few I've read show an astonishing versatility. The Drone, if I remember, is a were-bee romp and the germ of Pool Of The Stone God is quite possibly what Syd Bounds was attempting to rip off with No-Face in Fontana Horror 11. When I get back to Haining's The Fantastic Pulps, will brush up on The People Of The Pit which, if memory serves which it doesn't usually, is a lost race adventure?

Much of his work is available online via Project Gutenberg & Co. (we only have to wait until 2013 before he's Wordsworth friendly), and this item on G. W. Thomas's tasty Classic Pulps site will point you in all the right directions.

[andydecker]

For every colourful cover you got one understated

Avon Books 1963, 9th printing

I have most of Merritt in german editions, will scan them when I found them

[dem bones]

understated is just about the last word to describe this next. well done to Avon for crediting the artist.

A. Merritt - The Ship Of Ishtar (Avon, 1944: originally Argosy-All-Story, Nov. 1924)

Doug Rosa artwork for Avon 1966 edition

Blurb

SHIP OF LOVE: SHIP OF DOOM

The goddess of love and beauty was adrift on an enchanted ocean in a magic world. The myriad forces of satanic evil plagued the vessel of the red-haired, passionate goddess. Only one man, John Kenton, the American adventurer, could save Ishtar's priestess from the black magic which divides her world from ours.

"Unusual... strange and fantastic:' - The London Times

[andydecker]

So, here are some of the german Merritt´s.

Pabel Publishing, Terra Fantasy 35, 1976, Ship of Ishtar Part 1 as "Ship of Ishtar, 160 pages, cover by Sanjulian

Pabel Publishing, Terra Fantasy 36, 1976, Ship of Ishtar Part 2 as "Twice dying King", 160 pages, cover by Sanjulian

Terra Fantasy was one of those only at newsstands avaiable monthly paperback series, from the same publisher who did the Vampir Horror. I think for distribtution - and pricing - reasons length was limited. so instead of cuting the content to ribbons they did it in two parts, with was the exception and not the rule.

"Ship" even had the Virgil Finlay illustrations incooperated.

]Pabel Publishing, Terra Fantasy 47, 1978, Dwellers in the Mirage Part 1 as "Queen of the Shadowrealm", 160 pages, cover by Enrich

]Pabel Publishing, Terra Fantasy 48, 1978, Dwellers in the Mirage Part 2 as "Cave of the Kraken", 160 pages, cover by Enrich

Terra Fantasy was at first kind of a novum as Fantasy at the time was rather rare. Today it has relagated SF to a very small niche on the market, but in the mid-seventies it was still an experiment.

Terra Fantasy was published for 94 books, with writers as diverse as Thomas Burnett Swann, John Jakes, Andre Norton, Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, among others. And even if they were often abridged for length, this imprint was an inexpensive introduction for many readers to the genre.

The editor Hubert Strassl was an expert in the genre, also he was an accomplished writer both in horror and also in fantasy under his pseudonym Hugh Walker. He was one of the pioneers in the development of the german fantasy role-playing Magira. And he published his set of Magira novels in this series.


As I don´t have it avaiable, this is a scan from another source of the last Merritt they did.

Pabel Publishing, Terra Fantasy 79, 1981?. "The Face in the Abyss" as "Mother of Snakes"

This book is remarkable insofar that it was double-sized, which was possible then.

The Moonpool was published by Heyne in their Classics Imprint. Now as I write this I have to say that in hindsight this was kind of an golden age. A separate classics imprint which did writers like E.E.Doc Smith, Stanley Weinbaum or H.G.Wells. Today virtually unimaginable.

Heyne Publishing, 1978, 286 pages

Some years later all those books were published again by Fischer Publishing, at the time an upmarket "literary publisher" in an very uneven classic fantasy imprint with new translations.

[Craig Herbertson]

Sept 8, 2010 10:44:40 GMT andydecker said:

So, here are some of the german Merritt´s.

Sanjulian obviously had the vault in mind when he thought of covers

[lemming13]

Can't help gloating quietly over my collection of Merritt, downloaded free to my Kindle from Gutenberg... No, no, bad techie, must crush these electronic impulses!

[Johnlprobert]

Those German covers are quite splendid.

---and Dwellers in the Mirage is on the way!!

[timothymayer]

Wow. Look what I started.

[lemming13]

Just found out how to add images from my own pc to my Kindle collection for those books with no cover art to them, so has anybody got any idea where I can find an image of a good cover to Merritt's Dragon Glass? Already availed myself of some of these others, thanks very much people, but I'm missing that one and The Metal Monster.

[dem bones]

Tartarus reproduce a lovely 1946 Avon cover for The Metal Monster here.