The Moon Pool
A vanished expedition. A moonlit ruin. A power older than history.
When Dr. Walter T. Goodwin travels to the Pacific island of Ponape, he is following the trail of a mystery that has already swallowed lives. Beneath ancient stones and moonlit waters lies the Moon Pool: a threshold to a hidden world of radiant beauty, impossible science, and forces that seem more than human.
Drawn below the surface into the strange realm of Muria, Goodwin and his companions encounter wonder, terror, and a civilization shaped by light, desire, and ancient tyranny. At the heart of it waits the Shining One — beautiful, inhuman, and deadly.
First published in book form in 1919, A. Merritt's The Moon Pool helped define the borderland between lost-world adventure, weird fiction, and early science fantasy. Its prose is lush, its scale enormous, and its imagination unapologetically feverish.
Not a bare public-domain reprint. Many widely available editions descend from Merritt's later revised text, which replaced the German scientist Von Hetzdorp with the Russian Marakinoff and weakened the novel's connection to its First World War setting. This Squire Press edition returns to the first G. P. Putnam's Sons hardcover witness — restoring Von Hetzdorp, the original political context, and the retrospective coda dropped from the later version.
- A substantial new introduction on the real ruins of Nan Madol, Merritt's life and style, and the novel's influence on weird fiction, cosmic horror, and fantasy gaming
- A note on the book's unusual textual history and Merritt's own regret over his later revisions
- Thirty-six endnotes illuminating historical places, mythology, scientific ideas, and period references — without interrupting the story
- The original foreword and dedication, carefully restored
