Those fantastic ape monsters of Fantasy & Science Fiction show our interest in our shaggy relatives. Fiction writers produced tales of apes and apish creatures until the idea culminated in the cinematic version of the giant ape we all know as King Kong. Here are some of the apes of fiction that brought us to Willis O’Brien animating that beloved character. Kong lives on an island of dinosaurs and goes to New York to fight airplanes on the Empire State Building. ( I have excluded cavemen and neanderthals since they are really apish men and not apes proper.)
“Murder in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe (Graham’s Magazine, 1841) was an important tale in several literary histories. It was the first locked room mystery, the first false monster ghostbreaker tale, as well as a tale that featured an ape in a central way. August Dupin investigates a grisly and impossible murder that may have been committed by supernatural monsters. The truth proves to be an orangutan with an attitude problem.
The Ape Gigans from Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne (1864) is another worthy inclusion here. Verne proposes a giant ape that could live in the tunnels beneath the earth. As it plays out, the creature is just a figment of imagination. (Too bad.) Verne includes it as a way to scoff at the new ideas about evolution. He would do it again in The Village in the Treetops (1901), with an entire race of ape men.
Hendrika from “Allan’s Wife” by H. R. Haggard (1887) was the first of two Haggard ape creatures. Hendrinka is human but she is raised by baboons, adopting their savage nature. Ultimately she kills Allan Quatermain’s first wife. Kipling’s much kinder Mowgli would appear in 1894.
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1897) by H. G. Wells is a seminal tale because it gave us the idea of “manimals” (to quote a later film version). The crazy Dr. Moreau takes animals and surgically changes them into men. Unfortunately he can’t change their natures and they revert to their animal selves. Among the many kinds of manimals are ape creatures.
The White Apes of Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs first appeared in “Under the Moons of Mars” (All-Story, February-July 1912). These four-armed savage beasts would appear in most of the eleven Mars books. When Disney used them in John Carter of Mars (2012), they got a size increase.
The Mangani of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels are apes with a language and culture. ERB suggests they are slightly more advanced than other apes like the Bolgani or gorilla. Tarzan is raised among the Mangani and later becomes king of his band.
The Citadel of Fear by Francis Stevens (Argosy, September 14-October 26, 1918) featured an ape creature named “Ghengis Khan”. The hero, Colin O’Hara, wrestles with the long arm that grabs victims and fights it Beowulf-style.
“The Creeping Man” by A. Conan Doyle (The Strand, March 1923) was one of the later Sherlock Holmes tales collected in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927). These stories are often less famous or clever than the early ones but there are some weird gems among them like “The Creeping Man” which has a scientist injecting himself with ape glands, causing him to become animal-like.
Heu Heu the Monster by H. Rider Haggard (Hutchinson’s Magazine January-March 1924) was a late volume in the Allan Quatermain series. It features a giant ape statue but not such a creature. Despite this, the book inspired future ape monsters like those of Robert E. Howard.
“The White Ape” by H. P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, April 1924) was originally entitled “Arthur Jermyn” which at least doesn’t give away the story. When it was reprinted in Weird Tales in 1935 the title was changed back. Lovecraft suggests that old Artie has some ape relatives hanging around in his family tree.
Manly in “The Horror on the Links” (Weird Tales, October 1925) was from the first Jules de Grandin occult detective tale. The fact that the story has a Science Fiction explanation is a good indication how Quinn will often play the rest of the series.
“Red Shadows” (Weird Tales, August 1928) is the first of Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane adventures. In a quest to find the murderer, le Loup, Kane ventures all the way to Africa where a gorilla plays a part in vengence for a murdered girl.
“The White Wizard” by Sophie Wenzell Ellis (Weird Tales, September 1929) gives us another version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ brain transfer from 1927 in The Mastermind of Mars but that story is set on another planet.
“Manape the Mighty” by Arthur J. Burks (Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June 1931) (and it’s sequel January 1932) was a two story series about a man who has his brain placed inside the body of an ape. He fights amazing jungle battles before having it taken out again.
King Kong (1933) changed everything. Apes in fantastic stories now had to be bigger and badder. Kong inspired an entire sub-genre of film, the giant monster film, with giant insects and spiders in the drive-ins of the 1950s to the Japanese Godzilla and giant mechs of Toho Productions of the 1960s.
The Pulps would continue to use those fantastic ape monsters in stories after 1933, from the Sword & Sorcery of Robert E. Howard to Science Fiction stories like Manly Wade Wellman’s “Pithecanthropus Rejectus” (Astounding Stories, January 1938). Later, after the demise of the Pulps, comic books, DC in particular, would feature ape characters as villains in their superhero comics. Comics sold better with an ape on the cover…
