'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 are finely written little gems. They run the gamut from full-blown fantasy to lost-world adventure to outright science fiction, and abundantly demonstrate that Merritt was a master of the concise short form, as well as the full-length novel.

"The Ship of Ishtar" is a universally hailed as a classic of the fantasy novel genre. Merritt's writings were heavily influenced by H. Rider Haggard and Gertrude Barrows Bennett (writing as Francis Stevens), with Merritt having "emulated Bennett's earlier style and themes." What sets Merritt apart from the typical pulp author, however, is his lush, florid prose style and his exhaustive, at times exhausting, penchant for adjective-laden detail.