Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast--video version of Episode #10

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast--latest episode now available

Scott, Jess and I talk about ERB's 1915 sequel to At the Earth's Core.

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Giant Ants, Giant Cannibals and Lots of Crazy People

Read/Watch 'em in Order #20

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Land of Terror with the intention of serializing it, but none of the magazine editors who normally snatched up his stuff were interested. It was eventually printed as a book in 1944.

Burroughs’ longest series was, of course, the perpetually popular Tarzan. I’m pretty sure Burroughs could have written a novel in which the Lord of the Jungle spends the entire plot trying to teach a tribe of apes how to play Yahtzee and he STILL would have found a buyer for it.

But Land of Terror couldn’t find a home in the pulps. I can understand why. Though the novel as a whole is still entertaining, a few of the individual sections were poorly developed and there are several annoying anti-climaxes at the end.

The book picks up where Back to the Stone Age left off. David Innes (returning to center stage as protagonist and narrator for the first time since Pellucidar) is returning home with the expedition that located the badly lost von Horst (hero of the previous novel).  The party is attacked by a tribe of bearded women and David is captured. His allies think he’s been killed, leaving him pretty much on his own.

He soon escapes from the tribe of bearded Amazons, then gets captured by a tribe consisting entirely of insane people, all of them suffering dysfunctions that range from delusions of grandeur to severe hypochondria to random maniacal behavior.

Here he finds his wife, Dian the Beautiful, who had also been captured after a series of separate adventures. They escape, but get separated again. While searching for her, David gets successively captured by a tribe of ten-foot tall giants, a colony of giant ants; and a tribe that lives on a floating island. He escapes each time, though, and eventually gets home and reunites with Dian.

All this is perfectly fine in terms of the basic plot, but—as I mentioned earlier—several of the mini-adventures are perfunctory and read as if Burroughs needed to do one more re-write before he was done. Notably, the bearded woman tribe and the giant cannibal tribe are just there to be weird—Burroughs does nothing (other than milk a few reverse gender role jokes) with these potentially interesting civilizations other than let them hold David prisoner for a short time before he escapes.  Burroughs had a talent for building bizarre civilizations that have their own internal logic, but here he stops short of doing the job properly.

There’s a few other signs of laziness--as if Burroughs just wanted to get another Pellucidar novel out of the way so he could move on to something else.  David learns that Dian is being pursued by an unwanted suitor, something that’s supposed to build up suspense as it means David now need to find her as soon as possible. But this backfires when, at the novel’s climax, we learn that Dian resolved this situation off-screen. Heck, we don’t even get to meet the bad guy.

But the novel as a whole still manages to be fun. Burroughs generates some bizarrely dark humor out of David’s adventures in the village of crazy people, while the sequence in which he’s held prisoner by giant ants (and force-fed with regurgitated food by the ants) is genuinely creepy.

Oh, well, I know I shouldn’t complain. Burroughs himself explained that he wasn’t a fiction writer, but a biographer, getting his information from people like Jason Gridley, John Carter and the guy who knew the guy who knew Tarzan. So if David Innes has an adventure which isn’t quite as interesting as his previous ones, we really can’t shoot the messenger because of this, can we?

One of Pellucidar book to go and then we’ll move on to something else for the literature section of our Read/Watch ‘em in Order series.

"You're the man I've crossed a world to kill."

Read/Watch ‘em in order #18

Boy, Jason Gridley is certainly capricious. At the end of Tarzan at the Earth’s Core (1930), Jason’s attitude was: “I am NOT leaving Pellucidar until I find my lost friend—Wilhelm von Horst!”

By the time the action picks up again in Back to the Stone Age, Jason had apparently changed his point-of-view to: “Ah, the heck with it. I’m goin’ home!”

I suspect Burroughs had tentatively planned to use Jason as the hero or co-hero in the eventual sequel as he (Jason) searched for his missing friend. But, though Stone Age picks up right where its predecessor left off, it was seven real-life years before Burroughs got around to writing it. By that time, he had opted to center the story entirely around von Horst, leaving Jason with nothing to do but go home.

The story first appeared as a serial in Argosy Weekly in early 1937.  Its original title was “Seven Worlds to Conquer,” because von Horst runs into that many tribes (or—in one case—the nest of a very large animal) before his adventures are resolved. 

By the way, in case you’ve forgotten—von Horst was a member of the crew of the zeppelin O-220, which had entered Pellucidar through the opening near the North Pole on a rescue mission. He had become separated from the others fairly early in the previous novel and was still unaccounted for when the main plot of that novel was resolved.

Well, von Horst might have missed out on the action in Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, but he certainly wasn’t bored. The loosely structured sequel tosses him from one adventure into another as he escapes captivity in one location only to be captured by someone else.

This is an ERB novel, so along the way he meets the beauteous La-Ja, who is a fellow slave during one of his frequent periods of captivity. Their relationship runs the usual course—he takes a while to realize he’s in love, while she treats him like garbage due to a cultural misunderstanding. Even when she gets to like him, she continues to treat him like garbage, because there’s a big brute of a guy named Gaz back at her tribe who wants La-Ja for his mate. La-Ja is afraid Gaz will kill von Horst when the German insists on escorting her safely home.

It’s a variation of the same sort of situation that Burroughs used in many of his other novels. You’d think it would get old, but I’m never bothered by it. Burroughs always manages to generate a fair amount of humor and even charm in his romantic shenanigans, predictable as they might be. Also, Burroughs gives von Horst (perhaps my favorite of Burroughs’ one-shot heroes) a snarky sense of humor that adds to the overall fun.

What makes this entry in the Pellucidar series notable is the cool civilizations and animals that von Horst runs into. He’s captured by a weird flying reptile/kangaroo thing that injects him with a paralyzing poison and leaves him for newly hatched babies to eat. Later, he has to organize a mass escape of slaves while simultaneously holding off the slave-holders AND fighting a stubborn slave who refuses to accept his leadership.

Not long after that, he, La-Ja and a couple of other companions get captured by a race of fanged albino cannibals called the Gorbus. There’s an unusual metaphysical twist here, as the perpetually cruel and miserable Gorbus are implied to have once been humans on the surface world who had become what they are now after having committed murder. Odd theological implications aside, I’m just happy that Burroughs gives me the opportunity to link words “fanged,” “albino,” and “cannibals” together in the same sentence. How often does one get to do that?

Burroughs manages to get in a nice variety of action scenes throughout the book. Most notable, perhaps, is an escape from the mammoth men (a tribe who have trained mammoths to be riding beasts). This involves a sequence in which von Horst and several other prisoners are tossed into a narrow cavern, then given knives and spears. Large, untrained mammoths are released from one end of the cavern, while a number of saber tooth tigers enter from the other end. The ensuing free-for-all is a lot of fun (for us readers, I mean—not so much for the participants).

Along the way, Burroughs borrows a plot twist from “Androcles and the Lion” to give von Horst a large mammoth as a loyal companion. This is another element that’s completely predictable, but once again I’m not at all bothered by it. Having a mammoth as a loyal companion is simply too cool to allow for any objections.

In fact, it occurs to me that visitors to Pellucidar end up with some pretty cool pets. David Innes had his pet hyenadon in the second novel in the series and now von Horst ends up with a mammoth. Why anyone would ever be satisfied with a mere cat or hamster after reading these novels is beyond me.

Anyway, von Horst and La-Ja eventually make it back to her tribe, which leads to the von Horst vs. Gaz fight that poor La-Ja had been dreading. Von Horst gets a great line here just before the fight to the death begins: “You’re the man I’ve crossed a world to kill!” he snarls at Gaz. When you think about it, there’s really no sense in falling in love if it doesn’t give you a chance to use dialogue like that, is there?

David Innes gets a cameo at the end, which is where we find out that Jason Gridley and the O-220 had already gone home. Von Horst doesn’t mind, though. Like David Innes, he’s found a home at the Earth’s Core. And perhaps it’s just as well—considering who was running von Horst’s home country of Germany by this time, he was much better off where he was.

That brings us to Land of Terror, in which David Innes takes over as protagonist once again. This book and Savage Pellucidar will, sadly, begin a decline in the quality of the stories in this series, but the Earth’s Core will remain an interesting place to visit regardless.

It’s her job to get kidnapped and, by golly, she does it well!

Read/Watch 'em in order #13

The main job of any Edgar Rice Burroughs heroine is to get kidnapped on a regular basis. That’s pretty much a given.

But I think Dian the Beautiful might have broken an ERB getting-kidnapped record in Pellicidar (1915), the second novel in the series about the titular underground world.

Seriously--poor David Innes can’t seem to keep his wife at his side for more than a few minutes before yet another cave man or telepathic pterodactyl snatches her away. Anytime he so much as stops looking directly at her, yet another villain has made off with her.

At the end of At The Earth’s Core, David had used the Iron Mole to return to the surface. As the next novel begins, he returns to Pellucidar, having stuffed the mole full of reference books, weapons and ammo. He strings a telegraph line behind him this time—which is how Burroughs eventually learns of his further adventures.

But when he gets back, he discovers that the nascent empire he had formed to fight the Mahars had collapsed. And, by the way, his wife has been kidnapped.

So David spends the novel in a cycle of rescuing and losing Dian while also working to reform the Empire of Pellucidar. The plot, therefore, meanders a bit from one action set-piece to another, but it’s a fun meandering and the action is exciting, so there’s nothing to complain about.

Besides, Burroughs casually drops some really cool elements into the story at random intervals. David, at one point, saves the life of a savage (and man-eating) hyaenodon and manages to tame it. I’ve always liked dogs myself, but if I were now to ever own a pet, I don’t think I would ever be satisfied with anything less than a hyaenodon.

Actually, Burroughs liked doing this—giving his protagonist a savage beast for an unlikely but loyal companion. Tarzan had Jad-bal-ja, the Golden Lion. John Carter had Woola, his ten-legged Martian “guard dog.”

David also encounters several new tribes, including one that uses dinosaurs (specifically, diplodocus) as beasts of burden. While he’s having his adventures, Abner Perry teaches the natives ship-building, metal-working, sailing and gunsmithing. So, when David is finally able to hold on to his wife for more than a few minutes, he manages to re-establish his empire and lead a fleet of ships equipped with muzzle-loading cannon and rifles against the Mahar forces.

It all turns out to be a satisfying follow-up to the first book and brings the initial plot line to a satisfying conclusion. But Burroughs isn’t done with the world at the Earth’s core quite yet. He’s going to take a 14 year break from David Innes and Abner Perry, but in 1929 he’ll recount an adventure from the perspective of a native Pellucidarian. We won't wait 14 years before we take a look at that story.