The Story that Helped Make SF Famous!
This 1915 classic tells the story of a pool of force inside Polynesia's Nan Matol ruins created by the vibrational pattern of seven different lights, which release the "Shining One," a powerful, luminous being of radiant matter who can race down moonbeams, bearing away to his own realm men and women who wear a mingled expression of ecstasy and loathing on their faces.
The SF Encyclopedia hails him as "the supreme fantasy genius of his day." The mainstream Hartford Times called him a writer who "weaves a web of fantasy…with poignancy and poetry…stories of tremendous action and excitement." And the Saturday Review of Literature named him "a genius" whose work displayed "a fertility of imaginative resource…unique, eerie, compelling."
This is the original 15,000 word novelette, which was seriously abridged when joined with the sequel to make the novel The Moon Pool. Not only was Merritt a monumental success in his lifetime (1884-1943), but also he remained the field's bestselling author for the next four decades, selling over 7 million copies of his work in the U.S. alone.