Fantastic Jungle Adventures - Dark Worlds Quarterly

East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; Man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen. — Kipling

The jungles of the world are known for their dangers: fierce beasts and plants, savage warriors, treacherous ground with pestilence and disease all waiting for the unwary. These dangers are well known. Added to these, in the best stories, is the hint of the supernatural. “Darkest Africa”, India, South America, all have tales of ghosts, monsters and juju magic. Collected here are some of my favorites offered up from classic novels, Pulps and magazines. Whether our intrepid heroes are facing the magic of the ju-ju or strange creatures dwelling in the deepest forest, these stories promise both action and adventure as well as a chill down your spine.

All-Story and Argosy and all the combinations of those two titles were home to their share of jungle adventures. The two men behind the Munsey titles were Robert Davis and Thomas Metcalf who gave the world such famous authors as Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Metcalf’s mishandling of Edgar Rice Burroughs has gone down in Pulp history as a famous blunder. When ERB wrote The Outlaw of Torn, a Medieval adventure for Metcalf, the editor rejected it several times, then rejected the sequel to Tarzan, The Return of Tarzan. Burroughs walked away from Munsey’s exclusive. Davis tried to repair the relationship but in future Argosy had to bid for manuscripts the same as anyone else. In the end they published 10 of the 24 Tarzan books.

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Burroughs’ new policy meant that Argosy had to look for Tarzan knockoffs. The most prominent of these were provided by Otis Adelbert Kline. Kline started as an assistant editor at Weird Tales but went on to make a career of writing planetary romances and jungle adventures in the Burroughs’ mold. Kline was always careful to set his novels in different locales than ERB. Jan takes place India, rather than Africa. His Planet of Peril novels takes place on Venus rather than Mars, etc. There was a sort of urban legend that Burroughs and Kline had a feud going, but Irwin Porges found no evidence to support the truth of this.

Other jungle writers include Pulp speed factories like H. Bedford-Jones, reliable producers like Arthur O. Friel, J. Allan Dunn, Gordon McCreagh, and F. V. W. Mason. As the Pulp era progressed into the 1940s the contents of Argosy changed and jungle stories became few and far between. This may have been because of competition from specialized Pulps like Jungle Stories as well as comic books that included Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

The jungle of the Pulps becomes a locale that any kind of story can be told about: adventure, Sword & Sorcery, hero tales like several novels of Doc Savage including the first one, The Man of Bronze, to horror and even Science Fiction. Its dark and creepy shadows hide secrets, dangers and mystery. Who wouldn’t want to write about that? And even today writers are still at it: James Rollins’ Amazonia (2002) and Scott Smith’s The Ruins (2006) easily come to mind.

“The Anaconda” by M. G. Lewis (1808)

“Hunting of the Soko” (1881) by Phil Robinson