Customer Reviews

Seven Footprints to Satan

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4 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(1)
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I know that it is a bad idea to start an A. Merritt novel at bedtime, but I couldn't resist starting Seven Footprints to Satan. 4 hours later I had finished an amazing adventure breatlessly.

This novel tells the story of a man who meets up with Satan (who in a stroke of genius looks like Buddha) and is challeged by the evil one to play games of chance. To describe the game or give away much more would be terrible, but trust me to say that the suspense is intense.

This book feels like a 1930s Hollywood movie and probably would make a great modern film if only the industry knew about it.

Readers of Abraham Merritt's first four novels--"The Moon Pool," "The Metal Monster," "The Face in the Abyss" and "The Ship of Ishtar"--may feel a little surprised as they get into his fifth, "Seven Footprints to Satan." Whereas those earlier fantasy masterpieces featured exotic locales such as the Pacific islands, the Himalayas and Peru; extravagant purple prose, dense with hyperadjectival descriptions; and living light creatures, metallic sentient cubes, a lost semireptilian race and battling gods, "Footprints" takes place, for the most part, in good ol' New York City and its suburbs, and tells an almost realistic tale of kidnapping and crime in direct, almost blunt prose. Indeed, although "Footprints" first appeared in "Argosy" magazine in 1927, and in book form the following year, it almost reads as if it had come from the pages of one of the crime pulps, such as "Black Mask" or "Crack Detective Stories." In this fast-moving tale, we meet James Kirkham, an adventurer/explorer (and, with a name like that, future candidate for Star Fleet Academy!) who is kidnapped off the streets of downtown Manhattan by the minions of Satan, a crime lord/supervillain/evil genius. Kirkham is forced to play a game in Satan's lair, during which he is made to tread on seven glowing footprints, four of which are "fortunate" and three "unfortunate." Depending on the steps he lands on, he will either be killed, serve Satan for a year, be given a fantastic fortune, etc. I am not giving away too much by saying that Kirkham winds up a bond servant to Satan, and is compelled to commit various fantastic crimes while in his service. He is housed in Satan's mazelike chateau with dozens of others, and falls in love with a fellow prisoner, Eve. (I suppose having Kirkham's first name be "Adam" would have been forcing things a bit!)
Grotesque in appearance, vast of intellect, profound lover of beauty, and sadistic in the extreme, Satan makes for one terrific character. With his strain of Chinese background, he is reminiscent of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu, but also of the supervillains of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. Indeed, for much of the novel, it is unclear whether Satan is or isn't the actual article; Old Scratch himself. The scenes in which he is present are quite riveting. Merritt keeps things barely on this side of reality; nothing that transpires in the book--the museum theft, the slaves kept in bondage by the mind-altering kehft drug, the worldwide criminal organization, the high-seas piracy--is beyond the realm of credibility. And, suiting style to story, Merritt, as I mentioned up top, writes in spare, wonderfully controlled, crime-pulp prose. Thus, we get a line such as "I shot from the floor, and ...drilled [him] through the head." The dropping of the aforementioned purple prose makes the book seem lean and streamlined; it really does move, and keeps the reader turning the pages. The finale of the book is thrilling in the extreme, and concludes most satisfactorily. I have read that "Footprints" was turned into a 1928 film starring Thelma Todd as Eve, but from the plot synopses on imdb.com, it would seem that this film is a very loose adaptation, at best. I'd love to see it one day, just for comparative purposes, but can't imagine it equalling the suspense and excitement of the book. "Footprints" may have been a change in direction for A. Merritt, but it still makes for marvelous entertainment.

Simply put, this is the most exciting adventure story that I ever read. One of the other reviews said that it would make a good Indiana Jones movie and it definetly would. I wont go into the plot as the other reviews outlined it pretty well. I will only add that I had to track down this book several times as I lent it out and would never get it back as the lendee's lent it to someone else. Great escapist literature.

Abraham Merritt was one of the few good writers of the pulp era, and this novel is one of the few classics. It is not great literature by any means, but as far as escapism goes, one can't do better than this. Who can resist a plot where famous people are kidnapped and forced to gamble for their souls by a menacing satanic figure? In the right hands, this would make a great movie in the Indiana Jones vein.

I read this one years ago, and I mean years ago, and it has sort of stuck with me. I recently pulled in from our storage area (barn) and gave it a reread. I see why it has been lurking in the back of my mind all these years. Now to be sure, I do love pulp fiction and pulp fantasy, I make no apologies for that. The reading is fast and the reading, to my taste is fun. This is one of the better of the mass. Simply put, it is the story of a man who meet Satan and plays a game against him on his, Satan's, own ground. No spoiler here. The pace of the story is fast, the story telling great, and the imagination of the author is without equal. This is one of those books that you will set down with and not put down until the last page is finished. Recommend this one highly.

A. Merritt was one of the most popular writers in the fantasy field for many years. He had an unusual blend of elegance, poetry, awkwardness, romanticism and other patchquilt characteristics which, somehow magically, he pulled off. His pure fantasy novels, in the style of H. Riger Haggard, were a youthful fascination with me, a transportation to a never land that seemed at least possible if not hidden in the heart of a volcano somewhere. But 7FTS is altogether different. Though still somewhat stilted by a purple tint it is nonetheless a foreshadow or much more modern approach to suspense. I can seel Woolrich's work already determined. A plot involving white slavery, what seemed a tired artifice when I was a kid, but is already returning; drugs, Satanic overtones and a deadly stairway only equaled by the steps leading to Ming the Merciless, never to be scaled alive. It derives a lot of its horror from a truly surreal relationship between people ending up horribly and yet unable to stop doing what they are doing. A great read for the fantsy it is, part detective, part S&M (thought lightly), and partly the kind of writing where you assume the author saw it all at once and just hot handed his way through the manuscript in the kind of record time a fever dream might inspire.

A. A. Merritt was a true master of fantasy pulp fiction. The worlds that he created were in a class of their own, detailed, extravagant, mesmerizing. While some of this may have been due to being paid "by the word", the results were gratifying to the reader.

This particular story is not a typical fantasy. Rather, it falls somewhat into the genre of Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Fu-Manchu. "Satan" is a criminal lord, dealing in vice and drugs. His followers are motivated by the chance to gain Satan's power through mounting a staircase leading to his throne. If they choose the correct seven steps, they win.

"Satan" is NOT Satan, but he IS a gloriously evil character and very hard to defeat. The story is told through the eyes of the good guy. Who wins? Read the story! If you like Holmes, you will like this!

Merritt was a million-seller back when being a million-seller meant something. Think of him as a depression-era Stephen King. The parallel's not all that odd; _Seven Footprints_ was one of the first books optioned for film before it actually came out (the film came out in 1929, starred Creighton Hale as Kirkham and Thelma Todd as Eve, and is probably best remembered for featuring, in a very very small role, Loretta Young).

James Kirkham is a professional adventurer who's caught the eye of, yes, the diabolic one. Satan puts him to a test: he's got a game rigged up where there are seven steps from the floor of Satan's chamber to the top of this ziggurat-like thing. A machine randomly assigns four steps to be good and three to be bad. The person playing the game steps on any four of those seven, and depending on how many bad steps he steps on, he pays the piper (zero: you get to rule the world, one: you owe Satan one service, two: you owe Satan a year of service, three: you're up the creek). The person playing can stop, voluntarily, after any number of steps.

While in the custody of the big guy, Kirkham meets, and becomes enchanted with, the beautiful Eve, and the two of them try to hatch a plot to escape the clutches of the guy with the big trident, aided by an old friend of Kirkham's who just happens to have found himself in the same situation.

Yup, it's sensational adventure-type stuff, easy reading, G. A. Henty for adults. Good for escapism, but is kind of like sherbet; it's close to tasteless, goes down easily, and by the time you're done with the next course, you've forgotten it.