Edgar Rice Burroughs
27 books
- Pure pulp, and it knows it: John Carter wakes on Mars leaping thirty feet in the low gravity, befriends a four-armed green warrior, and everything moves at a sprint. If you want depth, look elsewhere; if you want swords and airships, you're set.
- You get a gloriously pulpy descent into Pellucidar, where David Innes faces sagoths, Mahar, and a world with no true horizon. The writing is dated and the romance is blunt, but the strange geography and relentless adventure make it easy to read with a grin.
- A quick, pulpy novella where an American officer, forbidden his whole life from sailing east of longitude thirty, washes up in a future England gone feral, lions in the ruins and all. If you like Burroughs in Tarzan mode, this scratches the same itch fast.
- These are episodes from Tarzan's boyhood among the apes, before Jane, and the odd charm is watching him puzzle things out alone, like the chapter where he tries to figure out what God is. Pure pulp, cheerfully dated in places, but easy fun in short bites.
- Read At the Earth's Core first, then this one pays off: David Innes hauls a telegraph line back into the hollow earth to find Dian and finish his war with the Mahars. Pure pulp, cheerfully absurd, and the timeless noon sun inside the planet still sticks with me.
- You get Tarzan miniaturized in the country of the Minunians, where rival city-states wage war and he has to survive as an unwilling pawn. It’s gloriously odd, pulpy, and more interested in invention than plausibility, so you’ll enjoy it most with your appetite for strange detours switched on.
- By this point Burroughs is just having fun, and it's contagious: Tarzan raises a lion cub into a loyal killer, a con man impersonates him, and there's a lost city run by gorillas. Pure pulp, cheerfully implausible, best read fast on a lazy afternoon.
- You get Tarzan at his most feral and resourceful, moving through Opar’s ruins with Jad-bal-ja beside him while greedy men blunder after its treasure. It’s pulpy, violent, and gloriously improbable, with a dreamlike jungle atmosphere that makes the clunky bits worth tolerating.
- You get Tarzan in expedition mode here, tracking a missing German family into a hidden Roman-descended empire deep in Africa. It’s a stranger, more old-fashioned adventure than the jungle books, with elaborate customs and court intrigue, so you’ll enjoy it most when you’re happy to let Burroughs wander.
- You get Tarzan alongside Jason Gridley in Pellucidar, Burroughs’s bizarre inner world of dinosaurs, savage empires, and perpetual daylight. It’s pulpy and exuberant rather than subtle, with the crossover feeling like a glorious excuse to pile two adventure series into the same wonderfully overstuffed machine.
- You get a wonderfully strange coming-of-age story in which Tarzan learns the jungle’s rules from Kala and Kerchak, then finds himself pulled between ape life and human society. The prose is pulpy and the colonial assumptions are dated, but Tarzan’s fierce intelligence and loneliness keep the book surprisingly alive.
- You get Tarzan dropped into Pal-ul-don, a hidden country of rival human peoples, dinosaurs, and wonderfully strange customs, with the loyal Om-at beside him. It’s pulpy and episodic rather than psychologically deep, but the lost-world invention keeps carrying you forward.
- You get Tarzan at his most grief-driven here: after finding his estate destroyed and Jane apparently dead, he turns vengeance loose across wartime Africa. The action is brisk and vividly pulpy, though the racist wartime caricatures and colonial assumptions can make this a difficult read.
- This is the one where Tarzan stumbles on a lost valley of crusaders' descendants still jousting in full armor, and an American named Blake gets swept into their knighthood. Pure pulp adventure, cheerfully absurd, and Burroughs knows it.
- Pure pulp, and it knows it: Tarzan gets marooned by his enemy Rokoff and builds a war party out of Akut the ape, a panther, and the warrior Mugambi. If you want a revenge chase with zero downtime, this delivers; if you want depth, look elsewhere.
- You’re in for Barsoom at its strangest: Tara of Helium, separated from everyone she knows, stumbles into the unnerving world of Ghek and the Kaldanes, then into the living game-board of Jetan. It’s episodic and gloriously odd, with enough grotesque invention to reward readers who like Burroughs off balance.
- John Carter lands back on Mars in the one valley everyone believes is heaven, and it turns out to be a slaughterhouse run on religious fraud. Pure pulp, breathless and silly in spots, but the pace never lets up, and fair warning, it ends on a brutal cliffhanger.
- You get a wonderfully odd blend of World War I submarine adventure, lost-world fantasy, and dinosaur peril, narrated by the capable but rather old-fashioned Bowen Tyler. The Caspak sections feel dreamlike and episodic, so it suits you if you enjoy pulp adventure with strange anthropology more than polished realism.
- You get the strangest Barsoom adventure here: Ulysses Paxton lands among brain surgeons, body-swapping experiments, and a civilization held together by ingenious brutality. It’s pulpy and episodic, but the bizarre medical imagination and Paxton’s steady decency make the book surprisingly easy to keep reading.
- Pure pulp in the best sense: you crash inside the hollow moon with Julian, dodge flesh-eating Va-gas, and fall in with the runaway princess Nah-ee-lah. It moves fast and asks nothing deep of you, so save it for when you want adventure, not subtlety.
- Billy Byrne starts out as a genuinely unpleasant Chicago thug, no charm, no heart of gold, and watching Burroughs slowly earn his change aboard ship and on a very strange island is the whole fun. Pure pulp, fast and dated in spots, but oddly sincere.
- Burroughs leaves the jungle for the thirteenth century: a stolen prince, raised to hate his own royal blood, becomes England's most feared outlaw. Sword fights arrive on schedule and you'll guess the secret early, which somehow doesn't spoil it.
- Pure pulp, and it knows it: Tarzan moping through Paris salons, duels, a Russian villain named Rokoff who won't stay down, then the lost city of Opar. You have to be in the mood for coincidence-driven adventure, but if you are, it moves fast and never bores you.
- Pure pulp adventure, and it knows it: Tarzan's boy Jack runs off with the old ape Akut and grows into Korak, half-feral and fiercely loyal to a girl named Meriem. If you can forgive the wild coincidences, it moves fast and the jungle stuff still works.
- You settle into John Carter’s fiercely personal race across Barsoom, where loyalty to Dejah Thoris matters as much as swordplay and every strange city seems to hide another danger. It’s melodramatic, pulpy, and wonderfully earnest, best read for the momentum and sheer oddness rather than psychological subtlety.
- You get a brisk, pulpy Barsoom adventure with Carthoris and Thuvia caught in political trouble, strange cities, and aerial escapes. Thuvia’s uncanny power to summon banths gives the romance some teeth, though the episodic plot feels more like a lively continuation than a deeply developed novel.