Abraham Merritt (1884-1943) was born today, January 20. His birthday is the first  of three giants of the fantasy field who birthdays fall every other day. The next two are Robert E. Howard and C. L. Moore. Posts on their birthdays to follow over the next couple of days.

There’s been something of a theme running through this year’s posts, and that is authors who have either never really received the recognition they deserve and are still writing, or they were once major figures who have been forgotten or nearly so.

Merritt was once a giant among the most prominent fantasy authors such as H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. For a while, he even had a pulp magazine named after him. It was published in 1949nand 1950. Being long dead, Merritt had nothing to do with it. As far as we know.

My point is that popularity is fleeting and not guaranteed. Some forgotten writers have disappeared from memory because they just didn’t write anything that stood out.

Abraham Merritt was not one of those. Merritt is deserving of being remembered. Last year I read Burn, Witch, Burn. I wasn’t able to read it in time to review it on Merritt’s birthday. I’ll use this novel as an example of why I say Merritt should be remembered.

The plot is straight forward, and I’ll not go into detail on it. Partly because I don’t trust my memory on the details. Basically the story is about a woman who makes lifelike dolls that look like living people. She sends them out to kill. A  young doctor sets out to stop her.

I found Merritt’s style to be quite readable. The book had plenty of acetion and suspense. The hero had to struggle and sacrifice to protect the woman he loved as well as other friends. Success was not guaranteed. It was  story worth reading and one that I would be willing to read again.

There is a tendency on the part of some people these days to avoid books written more than twenty years ago. I would argue that most of the best stuff was written long before that. Notice I said most, not all. There is still some really good stuff being published today.

While I am generally an advocate of read what you want, I think you could be doing yourself a disservice by not reading some of the foundational authors in the field.

Merritt would be one of those authors. He didn’t have a large body of work. His editorial duties at his day job kept him from being more prolific.

I’m not sure how readily his work is available, at least in print. Audio and ebook editions seem to be plentiful on the ‘Zon. Merritt’s work, at least some of it, is in the public domain, so I am a little suspicious about the quality of some of what I saw when I did a search.

He’s worth hunting down in paper, though. If you’ve not tried Merritt, check him out. Burn, Witch, Burn is a good place to start. So is Dwellers in the Mirage. And…