The Face in the Abyss [NOOK Book]

Overview

First Ever Unabridged reprinting of Classic Fantasy! A. Merritt is "a genius" whose work is "unique, eerie and compelling" according to the Saturday Review of Literature. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia justly says Merritt was "The greatest of American horror-writers. His stories carry within them the true note of fear the dread of the unknown ... [and] grow, like the unfolding of an evil flower whose deadly fragrence is both overpoweringly sweet and hateful to the senses, to a terrific climax." When a party of gold-hunters stumbles on a young woman whose ornaments are of gold, leading a llama carrying a basket full of gold through the Andean Jungle, the lust for wealth wipes all other thoughts from their minds. She is captured and brutally forced to lead the party to the source of the gold. Only Nicholas Graydon manages to cling to sanity, held back from gold-madness by his love for the woman, Suarra. Soon he finds himself traveling far ahead of the rest of the party in what seems a dream to the remote valley where Suarra's people dwell. There he is brought face-to-face with a trio of near-immortals whose miraculous powers may derive from magic or lost superscience. They are led by a strange being of giant, shimmering serpentine coils and a human torso known as the Snake Mother, who historian-critic Sam Moskowitz calls "the best rounded, most sympathetic, most memorable character" Merritt ever created. Back in his own body, Graydon and his companions complete the journey to Suarra's land, a strange world where the forms of man and beast have mingled and the descendents of Atlantis hold sway, and where the source of the gold is a gigantic golden Face that sweats liquidgold and looms over a vast abyss. It is a Face of pure evil and unearthly beauty and may be that of a captured god or some ancient relief sculpted of some mysterious, radioactive substance. There Graydon and the rest of the gold-hunters will meet the greatest test and danger ever devised for mortal men. One no human has survived for tens of thousands of years. Yet, the Snake Mother holds out one hope to Graydon, telling him there is only one force more powerful than the Face, if Graydon can discover what it is... The Face in the Abyss, as Moskowitz writes, is a "marvelous blend of action, superb characterization, philosophy, and poetic prose." Cut in half when it was added to a sequel, The Snake Mother, for hardcover publication, this special eBook edition represents the first-ever unabridged reprinting of the text of the original novella, The Face in the Abyss, since its original publication over eighty years ago.