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Free download people of the pit7/18/2023 ![]() “The People of the Pit” follows the formula of an explorer/scientist who journeys to the frontiers of the (to Europeans) known world to investigate a curious phenomenon, only to encounter horror and terror and supernatural dread. ![]() All three authors are included in The Weird. Lovecraft, who himself was an admirer of Stevens/Bennett. The explorers cremate the man according to his wishes and scatter his ashes to prevent the People of the Pit from claiming his body after death.Īccording to the editors, Merritt was heavily influenced by Gertrude Barrows Bennett, the first major female American science fiction and fantasy writer and inventor of dark fantasy, who published under the pseudonym Francis Stevens and wrote weird tales about lost civilizations. Horrified, he breaks his chains and escapes. Made a captive of the invisible, glowing creatures who live at the bottom of the pit, the man participates in their chanting rituals and eventually comes to see the inner sluglike forms. Having reached the mountains from the other side, the horrified speaker recounts how he journeyed down the bottleneck of the seemingly infinite pit that lies between the mountains, to finally reach the massive, primeval city at the bottom. He narrates the story of his encounter with the People of the Pit. A frightened man near death crawls up to their campfire and tells them he has just returned from those very mountains. Two men exploring the far northern reaches of Alaska come across a hazy mountain with five peaks outstretched like a hand where a strange light is glowing. It is, however, the first story in the collection to explicitly feature archaeology and past civilizations as a source of the weird (except perhaps in “The Hungry Stones” by Rabindranath Tagore). In this, my experience of “People of the Pit” by A. In addition, I keep finding parallels, in one way or another, to Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. Having come this far in this Archaeology of Weird Fiction project, I have noticed that certain patterns of representing the attraction and danger of the weird have begun to repeat as patterns.
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