Fantasy Newsletter No.58
- FANTASY NEWSLETTER, No.58 - A black ink and black and grey color pencil drawing on an 11 x 14 size coquille board. It appears of a fanzine cover.
This was another of those "draw what you want" assignments, and as I usually did in such cases, I turned my swivel chair and scanned the books in my library, searching for inspiration. I stopped when I came to my Abe Merritt books because an image popped up in my mind; a figurine I saw in an antique shop in Vermont a long time ago. That figurine reminded me of Merritt's story, "The Moon Pool". I decided to do the cover drawing based on my vague memory of that figurine.
As I drew the picture my thoughts went back in time to a meeting I attended at the Wayne Public Library in NJ. I was a member of the Eastern Science Fiction Association, and we met monthly at the library. The guest speaker was science fiction historian and anthologist, Everett F. Bleiler who gave a lecture on the works of Abraham Merritt. He mentioned book titles like, "The Moon Pool, "The Ship of Ishtar," "Dwellers in the Mirage," and "The Metal Monster," telling us how thrilled he had been as a youth, reading Merritt's stories and discovering that "sense of wonder" which was so awesome back then in the 1930's and 1940s.
But then Mr. Bleiler went on to say that he was now an older, wiser, and a more astute reader, and had come to realize how terrible the Merritt works of fantasy really are. That bothered me because I read those novels years ago and thought very highly of them. So, a few days later I decided I would re-read Merritt's novel, "The Metal Monster," to check out Bleiler's thesis. But I still found the novel an exciting read, so I don't buy his thesis, I do not accept his elderly and scholarly analysis, there are times when the beauty of a thing is lost on a jaded mind.
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