Book Review

The Metal Monster

by A. Merritt

     Serious record collectors will be familiar with rock genres like prog rock, krautrock, space rock, and heavy psych. These kinds of music had themes of mysticism, science fiction, fantasy, space travel, drug trip, and the experience of alternate dimensions. Some of it had high technical proficiency while at other times the bands had more imagination and enthusiasm than musical ability. They spanned the full range from profound to downright goofy. The best of these bands are obscure. What all those genres had in common was a strong desire to offer their listeners a mind blowing experience. A. Merritt’s novel The Metal Machine is like a literary version of those genres, albeit one that was published 40 years earlier, and it would appeal to the same kinds of people.

     Something has to be said about Merritt’s writing style. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. He was a pulp science fiction author who set himself apart by writing in a Victorian style with long sentences, highly detailed descriptiveness, and an over-abundance of adverbs. Some of his sentences seem like little more than strings of adverbs so much so that the meaning of the sentence gets lost. But the descriptions of characters, their surroundings, and the metal creatures they encounter are precise and easy to visualize. Merritt’s dialogue tends to be wooden but conveys the meaning of the story clearly. His descriptive writing style does not work so well with landscapes and background scenery which come off as sketchy, sparse, and sometimes confusing. It does not work so well in passages of violence, warfare, or action either; these battles move slowly when a leaner vocabulary range would have sped up the fights to a normal pace. I do not know if there is a literary equivalent to slow-motion film sequences but if there is, A. Merritt found it. He did have the ability to write descriptive prose well; he just applied it to the wrong parts of the novel. The Metal Monster was serialized, written in monthly installments for a pulp sci-fi magazine and this does effect the flow. There are times when reading it can make you drowsy but if you concentrate and pay attention to all the fine details, it is a rewarding reading experience. Lazy readers, people with short attention spans, and anyone who gets bored with writing that lasts longer than a Twitter post aren’t going to get anything out of this.

     Then there are the characters. Professor Goodwin is a botanist, traveling from Persia to Tibet with a Chinese cook he hired in Tehran and a pony, neither of which figure significantly in the story. The cook gets killed off early in the narrative. Goodwin is searching for a rare plant; you may wonder if it is some kind of hallucinogen considering Merritt himself was a botanist who specialized in psychedelics. As he enters a valley filled with blue poppies (yes the poppies used for making heroin), he meets up with his friend’s son Dick Drake. They move on an eventually encounter two more friends, Ventnor and Ruth, who are also brother and sister. How four old friends just happened to meet up with each other while wandering in a remote region of Central Asia is a mystery. If you get too caught up in it, you will not be able to focus on the more interesting aspects of the novel. When strange things begin to happen, a beautiful sorceress named Norhala appears like a fantasy woman and protective mother figure straight out of the pages of Playboy. She saves them from getting killed, falls in love with Ruth, and takes her away to another dimension. Of course, Dick Drake has fallen in love with Ruth and Ventnor is her guardian brother so they have to chase after the two pretty lesbians.

     The thrust of the story is that an ancient city of Persians has somehow survived in the valley, untouched by time and living the way they did thousands of years ago. The Persians are ruled by Cherkis, the son of Xerxes whose people had been chased away when Alexander the Great invaded. These timeless fighters are engaged in constant conflict with Norhala who commands a giant metal monster made out of cones, cubs, and spheres. It can change forms according to the needs of the time and works well as a serious ass-kicking war machine that defeats the Persians every time.

     A large portion of the book is taken up by descriptions of the metal creatures who are actually parts of a metal city which is a complete living being. The metal city/monster is controlled by a giant upside down cross and an oval disk; they drain energy from the sun to feed the smaller metal particles who do the bidding of Norhala according to her needs. The metal monster is actually peaceful and not inclined to harming anything unless necessary.

     In the middle of all the action is Ruth. She is a one-dimensional character, sometimes partially nude and twice tied up for some light bondage scenes; like Helen of Troy, she gets kidnapped and tossed around like a ball from captor to captor. When the Persians abduct her, she is the prize sough after by Norhala the lesbian witch and the metal monster who engage them for the final confrontation.

     The key to the meaning of The Metal Monster is revealed when Ventnor explains the dreams and visions he had while unconscious. The metal monster exists sometime in the future; it is literally metal technology that evolved to the point where it became self-conscious and no longer needed humans to control it. The only surviving link between humanity and the metal monster is Norhala and her servant Yukun, a grotesquely deformed eunuch dwarf who is enslaved to her, worships her, and does whatever she commands. He is the symbolic remnant of a human race that is no longer relevant. The novel can be read as a conflict between humanity’s barbaric past, represented by the Persians, and the technological future, represented by the metal monster. The moral ambiguity is that the metal monster is capable of exterminating humanity and nature while the brutal and sadistic Persians show strength and humanity in their reverence for beauty and the desire to fight for survival. Technological advancement comes at a price. Caught in the middle of this struggle are Professor Goodwin and his friends, the representatives of contemporary humanity.

     This novel can be considered dated but some knowledge of the cultural context from which it came can go a long way in making it comprehensible. This is a place where context DOES matter so I will politely tell postmodern literary theorists and deconstructionists to fuck off at this point. In the 1920s, metal was a valuable commodity; industrialization, architecture, and the rise of the automobile industry made it one of the most sought-after materials. America was emerging from the Gilded Age and sleek, steely, shiny objects were revered along with their artistic counterpart in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco stylizations. New discoveries in science were changing the understanding of the relationship between matter and energy. America and Europe had just finished World War I, a meeting ground for primitive barbarity and technological power where the possibility of the mass slaughter of human beings was witnessed by many firsthand. The animistic and occult theologies of Gnosticism and Theosophy were in vogue in some literary and artistic circles. Some writers saw the American version of the English language as a degenerate form of traditional English so they wrote with a Victorian idiom, mistakenly believing themselves to be prese0rving the true English language. Add all these elements into the mix and you can get a clear picture of where A. Merritt was coming from he wrote this.

     Finally, I can hear some stoners out there saying, “he must have been doing some heavy drugs when he wrote this”, as if that is a default answer that some people have to anything mystifying, strange, or far out of the norm. I have to say though, even while reading for deeper meaning, there are some passages in The Metal Monster that made me say, “yeah he must have been tripping pretty hard when he wrote this.” There are some long passages that appear to be little more than a light show meant to dazzle people under the influence of LSD. But if you, ahem, are one of those who have experimented with mind-altering substances then those passages can be quite enjoyable. Even if those sections are flawed, along with other aspects of the book, there is still a lot to be gotten out of this unique work of fantasy. You have to make the effort though. 

Merritt, A. The Metal Monster. Avon Publications Inc., New York: 1920.