The Face in the Abyss (Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature)
At a glance:
- Author: A. Merritt
- First Published: 1923
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Fantasy—evolutionary fantasy
- Time of Work: The 1920s and 1930s
- Setting: Primarily the lost civilization of Yu-Atlanchi in the Andes Mountains
- Genres: Long fiction, Fantasy
- Subjects: 1920’s, 1930’s, Greed, Mines, miners, or mining, South America or South Americans, Gold mines or mining, Apocalypse
- Locales: Andes
The Plot
The Face in the Abyss was published as a novel toward the end of A. Merritts career. A story with the same title appeared as a thirty-five-thousand-word story in 1923. After several years, Merritt wrote a sequel, “The Snake Mother.” The two stories were combined to form the novel, which develops two seamlessly integrated plots united by the archetypal theme of the curse of gold (greed), by the motif of the treasure hunt, and by the figure of the protagonist, the young American adventurer Nicholas Graydon, whose explorations of the jungles of Central America...
[The entire page is 868 words long]
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