The Moon Pool
A. Merritt
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Sept. 26, 2015)
What secret compulsion made this lovely girl the handmaiden to unnatural horrors? The pioneering bestselling classic -a lost-world novel in the tradition of Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, and James Hilton – by the father of pulp science fiction, and the literary inspiration for ABC's hit TV series Lost, finally back in print! Dr. Walter T. Goodwin is sailing back to New York after a botanical expedition to the South Seas when he meets his old friend, Dr. David Throckmartin. The heartbroken Throckmartin relates a haunting tale to Dr. Goodwin-a tale of a tropical island and a strange stone door through which a hypnotic otherworldly light shines. Throckmartin tells of how the light had captured his companions and of his own powerlessness to stop it. When his friend disappears, Dr. Goodwin sets out to find the source of the mysterious moonlight. Little does he realize how formidable a foe he has pitted himself against. First published in 1918, The Moon Pool is commonly considered to be the inspiration of the ABC series LOST. “His face shone with a rapture too great to be borne by living man, and was shadowed with insuperable misery. It was as though it had been remoulded by the hand of God and the hand of Satan, working together and in harmony. You have seen that seal upon my own. But you have never seen it in the degree that Stanton bore it. The eyes were wide open and fixed, as though upon some inward vision of hell and heaven! The light that filled and surrounded him had a nucleus, a core — something shiftingly human shaped — that dissolved and changed, gathering itself, whirled through and beyond him and back again. And as its shining nucleus passed through him Stanton’s whole body pulsed radiance. As the luminescence moved, there moved above it, still and serene always, seven tiny globes of seven colors, like seven little moons.”