Edmond Hamilton’s first appearance in any professional publication was “The Monster-God of Mamurth” in Weird Tales, August 1926. In this tale, an archaeologist seeks out the forbidden city of Mamurth, where he finds a temple made of invisible bricks. Inside the temple dwells the old god the Mamurtans worshipped, an invisible spider of gigantic proportions. Caught inside an invisible maze, he must find a way to safety. In the end he crushes the invisible thing with a piece of masonry:
“There was a thrashing sound on the staircase, and the purple stream ran more freely, and by the outline of its splashes, I saw, dimly, the monstrous god that had been known in Mamurth in ages past. It was like a giant spider, with angled limbs that were yards long, and a hairy, repellent body. Even as I stood there, I wondered that the thing, invisible as it was, was yet visible by the life-blood in it, when that blood was spilled. Yet so it was, nor can I even suggest a reason. But one glimpse I got of its half-visible, purple-splashed outline, and then, hugging the farther side of the stairs, I descended. When I passed the thing, the intolerable odor of a crushed insect almost smothered me, and the monster itself made frantic efforts to loosen itself and spring at me. But it could not, and I got safely down, shuddering and hardly able to walk.
Weird Tales was full of stories of giant spiders including “Monsters of the Pit” by Paul S. Powers, “Spider Mansion” by Fritz Leiber and “Spider Bite” by Robert S. Carr. Hamilton adds the invisibility to make it more fun. His invisible temple may have inspired H. P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling’s “In the Walls of Eryx” (written January 1936, but appeared in the October 1939 issue of Weird Tales), where a similar maze on Venus kills its captives by slow starvation rather than giant spiders.
Hamilton’s inspiration for this tale is certainly linked to A. Merritt. In Seekers of Tomorrow (1967) Sam Moskowitz wrote:
One of the “greats” of Argosy’s fantasy writers was A. Merritt, and his works became literary icons for young Hamilton’s worship. Using as his inspiration, Merritt’s classic “The People of the Pit” (All-Story Magazine, January 5, 1918), a masterpiece about a lost city in an Alaskan cave, Hamilton made his first attempt to become a professional writer with a short story, “Beyond the Unseen Wall”, Weird Tales’ editor, Farnsworth Wright, rejected it because of an unclear ending, but almost a year later, rewritten as “The Desert God”, it was accepted by him and appeared under the title “The Monster-God of Mamurth”.
What I find interesting here is that this story is not like anything that follows in Hamilton’s career of over two hundred stories, dozens of novels and hundreds of comic book scripts. His second story was “Across Space”, and it is that one that set the pattern. Based more on H. G. Wells, it has a team investigate Easter Island and discovering a race of space vampires. The Merritt style story seems a one-off. Hamilton never claimed either of these authors as his main influence. He says:
It was not A. Merritt, much as I admired his work, who most influenced my
own early efforts. It was an early day writer for the Munsey magazines, Homer Eon Flint. His stories in 1918-1919, though sometimes wooden in style and heavy in conception, set my young imagination ablaze with their
vaulting visions of what vast possibilities future time and space might contain. I have, through the years, often testified my debt to this now somewhat forgotten writer, and I am glad to do so again. (Afterword to The Best of Edmond Hamilton).
Does this actually scan? One of the elements of The Lord of Death and The Queen of Life is a group of four scientist interacting as they solve their plots. In this way Hamilton does emulate Flint. Hamilton often has a singular narrator but the story will always revolve around a small group of characters, often two against a third who has gone crazy. The endless invasion scenarios seem closer to Wells but H. G. preferred a singular narrator who encounters different people. Think of Prendrick or the narrator of The War of the Worlds. Wells’s protagonists don’t team up to stop some mad scientist. The exception here is The Invisible Man but that novel is constructed in a different way, with a floating narrative that only involves Kemp about midway.
Ultimately, Edmond Hamilton took what he wanted from Homer Eon Flint, H. G. Wells and even A. Merritt, to create his own way of telling a story. Hamilton’s style has stood the test of time, as his work is still intriguing, far less dated than that of many older SF writers. “The Monster-God of Mamurth” is good example of this. His first story is a Weird Tales classic in its own right.
