'The People of the Pit and Other Stories' is a collection of Abraham Merritt's short stories, and contains seven stories and two "fragments". These short stories span the entire career of the man who has been called America's foremost adventure fantasist of the 1920s and '30s. Several of the tales boast the lush purple prose of Merritt's early period (as seen especially in his first two novels, "The Moon Pool" and "The Metal Monster"), but all seven...