Drink We Deep

With our latest Best of Argosy release, we show a different side of Arthur Leo Zagat, one akin to the immortal fantasy adventures created by Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt, with just a dash of H. P. Lovecraft.

Arthur Leo Zagat graduated from Fordham University Law School in what ended up being a very bad year - 1929. Thanks to the stock market crash and the resulting depression, he, like his contemporary Erle Stanley Garner, never practiced law. Instead, Zagat teamed up with another struggling young attorney, Nate Schachner, collaborating on a raft of science fiction and fantasy yarns for Wonder Stories and similar pulps.

Striking off on his own, Zagat soon established himself as a versatile writer. His skills and reputation grew, and by the mid-1930s, he cracked the top pulp magazine, Argosy, producing a string of serialized fantasy novels that were nothing like anything Zagat had ever penned previously.

Drink We Deep was the first of these. It ran in six parts, beginning with the July 31, 1937 Argosy.

It's the eerie account of brave archeologist and paleontologist Hugh Lambert, and the weirdness he discovered in pastoral upstate New York. We don't want to give away any story secrets, so we'll just quote the blurb adorning Drink We Deep's Fantastic Novels reappearance:

Beneath the timeless rocks of the Heiderbergs - slumbering below Lake Wankooka's unfathomed waters - lies the seed of Earth conflict. For there lives the strange and troubled race of other worldlings, waiting, always waiting, for the hour of deliverance.... And on the Earth's surface, one man feels in his blood an irresistible summons that calls him to their side..."

We know little about the inspiration for this fearful fantasy. Except this: "My daughter's summer camp gave me the setting and the inspiration for Drink We Deep," Zagat once revealed.