Book Review: Land of Terror by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Pellucidar books were Edgar Rice Burrough’s third big book series after Tarzan and Barsoom. They use the Hollow Earth premise that our home planet is not solid inside, but has another land upside-down to the surface which can be accessed by holes at the poles or certain other locations, or simply drilled to. Mining heir David Innes and his inventor friend Abner Perry use an “Iron Mole” to go 500 miles into the core of the Earth to discover Pellucidar and have many adventures there.
This is the sixth book in the series, and the last published during ERB’s lifetime. It follows directly on from the end of the previous novel Back to the Stone Age. Having successfully located a lost explorer (only to have him decide to stay with the woman he loves), David Innes and his men head back to their home base of Sari. The natives of Pellucidar have a homing instinct that points infallibly to the place of their birth, so instead of retracing the winding route they took to get there, they head straight across country to the desired spot, through lands none of them have ever encountered before.
David gets separated from his party when they’re attacked crossing a river, and is taken captive by the bearded women of Oog. For unknown reasons, the Amazonian women of this tribe are bigger and stronger than their men. Deemed too “feminine-looking” for snu-snu, David is enslaved and put to work in the fields. Here he befriends another captive, Zor of Zoram. Zoram is not too distant from Sari, so Zor can point them in the right direction, once David figures out how to escape.
However, the way home lies through the land of the Jukans, a populous tribe with the hat of all being “crazy”. Despite their seeming insanity, the Jukan villages are quite advanced for the Stone Age, and the pair find themselves trapped as “guests” in the king’s palace. Not prisoners, exactly, but not allowed to leave. David and Zor befriend serving girl Kleeto, who turns out to be a captive from Suvi, another village in the direction of Sari. Zor and Kleeto start having feelings for each other.
David eventually manages to fall afoul of the king, and is tossed into a holding area. Which is actually a corridor. While exploring, he hears the prince trying to “seduce” a captive woman. She’s not having any of it, and the prince lets slip that the secret passage David is in leads to outside the city. David decides to rescue the woman, a good thing as she is in fact his wife, Dian the Beautiful, who got captured by the Jukans when she came looking for him. David stabs the prince (non-fatally as it turns out) and the two flee down the tunnel.
Outside the city, the happy couple rest up in a handy cave, but David decides he has to go back to rescue Zor and Kleeto. Wearing a simple disguise, David re-enters the palace and manages to get Zor out, but he then has to let Zor go in through the escape tunnel to get Kleeto out. While waiting, David checks in on Dian, only to discover that she’s disappeared, apparently abducted by another man!
He eventually loses the trail, and himself, not having the Pellucidarian homing sense. After wandering some more, David spots what looks like a man and woman traveling together. Has he caught up to Dian and her captor? Nope, it’s Zor and Kleeto. The three start heading back towards their homelands. Along the way, David impulsively saves a young mammoth from a bog, earning the friendship of his mighty family.
During a storm, our travelers get separated from the mammoths, and are captured by the Azarites, seven foot tall tusked cannibals, who fatten them up for the inevitable feast. David manages to use his bond with the mammoths to get them to attack the Azarite village and drag him to safety, but he loses track of Zor and Kleeto and where he is. The mammoths then wander off never to be seen again.
Next, David wanders a little too close to some giant anthills and is taken prisoner by the giant ants and stuffed in their larder. There he meets fellow soon to be snack U-Val, who is from the floating island of Ruval. Thanks to a fortuitous attack by a giant ant bear, David and U-Val are able to escape.
U-Val, sadly, is not a good person. As soon as he’s built a boat to take him back to Ruval and David thinks they’re parting as friends, U-Val ties our hero up while he’s asleep. It turns out that Ruval is a slaver society and U-Val needs at least one slave to be able to get married to the woman he has the hots for.
David, ever the quick thinker, bides his time until they reach Ruval, then cleverly makes himself useful enough to the Ruvalians that U-Val can’t claim him as a slave. This eventually ends in U-Val’s death at David’s hands, but the other Ruvalians accept that he had it coming. David finds that one of the slaves on a rival island is from Suvi, and escapes with her as his guide.
All ends happily for David and Dian as they are reunited.
Whew! Now that’s an adventure novel!
Good: Lots of action, interesting twists and turns and the amazing setting of Pellucidar. David is very much the action hero, but Burroughs doesn’t overdo the competence and we often see him struggle and even be outmatched from time to time.
Less good: This was the only Pellucidar novel not to be serialized in a magazine, as all Burroughs’ regular publishers rejected it. And yeah, I can see why. It’s basically David ping-ponging from one wacky wayside tribe to another, hopelessly lost and just dealing with whatever problem is right in front of him.
And there are aspects of the story that haven’t aged well. The Oog sequence is a classic “persecution flip” (oppressed group in real life gets to be the oppressors instead) with the message that it sure would be awful if women were in charge because they’d treat us men even worse than we treat them when we’re in charge. It doesn’t occur to David for even a moment that maybe equality of the sexes is a better option. (In fairness, he lost contact with modern civilization in 1914.)
The Jukan section is ableist and “look at the funny but dangerous crazy people.” Their society, though, is surprisingly functional as it works on a mutual “humor the lunatic” culture that with a little more thought put into it could have been sharp satire.
And the floating island sequence is another persecution flip as the black Ruvalians enslave white mainlanders. In this case, though, David notes they’re no worse than any other slavers he’s met in Pellucidar.
There’s copious use of Burroughs’ trademark contrived coincidences and the novel just zooms to an ending when he reaches the desired page count. Thus a guy who’s been built up as a potential final boss villain is unceremoniously killed off-page by Dian once she no longer needs him to protect her from worse threats, and David never even meets the man.
On the other hand, it’s nice to know Dian is fully capable of handling her own problems when she has to.
And it’s still a very entertaining story.
I’d recommend either starting with the first book, At the Earth’s Core, or the crossover novel Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, but if you happen to find this one at a garage sale or a Little Free Library, and you can handle the dated portions, it’s worth a read.
