Tarzan: The Lost Adventure

Tarzan: the Lost Adventure is a novel written by Joe R. Lansdale based on an incomplete fragment of a Tarzan novel written by Edgar Rice Burroughs but left unfinished at his death. The book was serialized in four parts by Dark Horse Comics, before being published as a single volume in 1995.

Plot

In Burroughs' last Tarzan story, left unfinished at the time of his death, the ape man plays guardian to an expedition seeking the lost city of Ur. In addition to Tarzan himself, his animal companions Jad-bal-ja, the golden lion, and Nkima, the little monkey, are also brought back for one last swan song. Burrough's manuscript ends before Ur is reached, but in the novel as completed by Lansdale, Ur turns out to be a society revering a giant and supposedly immortal praying mantis, which is used to slay condemned prisoners in the arena. Tarzan speculates that the creature is originally from the underground world of Pellucidar, to which Ur is connected by a system of caverns and passages. Trapped underground at the end of the story, he seeks escape by seeking out the route to Pellucidar himself.

Reception

The novel received generally favorable reviews at the time of its release. In the 2005 essay "Forty More Years of Adventure" (which is included in the 2005 edition of Master of Adventure: The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs by Richard A. Lupoff), Phillip R. Burger praises Lansdale's prose style in the novel as an "appropriate extension in the evolution of Burroughs' prose" (but asks "Would Burroughs have ever made Tarzan battle a 'croc'?") and welcomes Lansdale's depiction of Tarzan as the "elemental force" and the "vicious 'throw the decapitated head into the enemy's camp' ape-man" of the earlier Burroughs Tarzan novels.

Tarzan series

The Lost Adventure, is the twenty-seventh book published in the Tarzan novel series. It follows Burroughs 24 main novels, a children's novel by Burroughs, and Fritz Lieber's authorized Tarzan and the Valley of Gold which was published in 1966 as the 25th Tarzan novel.

Lansdale's novel, was followed by two further novels authorized by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.: R. A. Salvatore's 1997 Tarzan: The Epic Adventures, and Philip José Farmer's 1999 the Dark Heart of Time.

Copyright

The copyright for this story has not expired, and it is not public domain.

External links

• ERBzine.com Illustrated Bibliography entry for Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan and the Lost Adventure
• Edgar Rice Burroughs Summary Project page for Tarzan: the Lost Adventure (ERB Manuscript)
• Comparison between Lansdale's completed novel and ERB's manuscript