278 pages
Published 1931
Read from November 27 to November 29
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
Who’s ready for a colonialist old dungeon crawl adventure from the early days of dark fantasy pulp? We got your ivory-skinned Atlantean princess, we got your winged serpents, we got your lizard people and your snake people and your spider people. We got your ancient evil giving orders and weeping gold through a stone face in a cavern. We got your shitty, all-pervasive racism and sexism. There’s even an evil garden! And mixed up in all of it, we got your standard interchangeable white dude, all effortless confidence and fisticuffs, trampling through the lost world, hoping to get the girl as a literal reward.
Today’s special boy is a lump of masculinity named Graydon, an American mining engineer recruited by adventurers to help steal hidden Incan gold. The group speed-runs The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in record time, with Graydon punching out professional adventurer Starrett by page 4, and the others drawing guns on Graydon by page 14. Graydon alienates his companions by rescuing the ivory-skinned Suanna from their clutches. Suanna, in turn, guides the adventurers into her Atlantean lost world, a hidden valley high in the Andes. Her people call themselves Yu-Atlanchi, but come on — it’s Atlantis.
In a pleasant surprise, the land of Yu-Atlanchi has dinosaurs! They aren’t scientifically rigorous dinosaurs by any means — even by the 1930s, only a pulp writer would amalgamate iguanodonts and theropods into one toothy, pointy-thumbed beast — but an elf-coded Atlantean in green, out hunting on dinosaur-back with a pack of dinosaurian game-hounds, was a pleasure I wasn’t expecting when I picked up this book. We’re also treated to a high-speed dinosaur race and a gladiator fight against a small theropod. Dinos don’t fill many pages here, but the mix of genres and vibes is exquisitely D&D-esque.
And really, the pulpy roots of D&D are what draw me to books like this. Wizards of the Coast alienated everyone with its shady business practices, its AI art, and its misplaced loyalty to racist old tropes. D&D was a huge part of my life for a number of years, though, and I’ll always be fond of the vibe. The titular Face itself could be a direct inspiration for the eidolon of Moloch, which graced the player’s handbook in the first edition of AD&D.
Merritt tosses so many elements into his pulp stew that sometimes it can’t help but be entertaining. It helps that his prose, while conventionally forgettable, is miles better than Edgar Rice Burroughs’. Ultimately, though, Face is predictably mired in the mores of its time, in its vile racial theory and foul gender norms. Fun it may be in spots, but that’s impossible to overlook.
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