Top Ten Favorite Edgar Rice Burroughs Monsters

My top ten monsters from Edgar Rice Burroughs don’t come from Tarzan. The vine-swinger had some great adventures but for the most part the most fantastic thing he ever saw were the dinosaurs of Pellucidar and Pal-u-don. (There is one exception, of course.) The white apes of Mars are frightening but they are just four-armed apes after all. (Even when they get a brain transfer.) The lion shows up in many forms, but again, a lion. It is in ERB’s other works that the real flare for the bizarre comes out. Here in alphabetical order (because I am too lazy to pick an ultimate fav) are my top ten favorite critters from the fantastic worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The Apt

The Apt in “The Yellow Men of Mars” (Amazing Stories, August 1941) is Burroughs trying to create the most formidable monster possible. Though John Carter has to defeat it all the same:

…It was an apt, a huge, white furred creature with six limbs, four of which, short and heavy, carry it swiftly over the snow and ice; while the other two, growing forward from its shoulders on either side of its long, powerful neck, terminate in white, hairless hands, with which it seizes and holds its prey. Its head and mouth are more nearly similar in appearance to those of a hippopotamus than to any other earthly animal, except that from the sides of the upper jawbone two mighty horns curve slightly downward toward the front. Its two huge eyes inspire one’s greatest curiosity. They extend in two vast oval patches from the center of the top of the cranium down either side of the head to below the roots of the horns, so that these weapons really protrude from the lower part of the eyes, which are composed of several thousand ocelli each.

Horibs

The Horibs from Tarzan at the Earth’s Core (Blue Book, September 1929 – March 1930) are another intriguing species. In many ways they are more advanced than the humans who dwell in savagery. Unfortunately, they like to eat people. They ride on giant lizards called Gorobors. I am sure these ERB critters inspired the lizardmen of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons:

Now for the first time Tarzan was able to obtain a good view of the snakemen and their equally hideous mounts. The conformation of the Horibs was almost identical to man insofar as the torso and extremities were concerned. Their three-toed feet and five-toed hands were those of reptiles. The head and face resembled a snake, but pointed ears and two short horns gave a grotesque appearance that was at the same time hideous. The arms “were better proportioned than the legs, which were quite shapeless. The entire body was covered with scales, although those upon the hands, feet and face were so minute as to give the impression of bare skin, a resemblance which was further emphasized by the fact that these portions of the body were a much lighter color, approximating the shiny dead whiteness of a snake’s belly. They wore a single apronlike garment fashioned from a piece of very heavy hide, apparently that of some gigantic reptile. This garment was really a piece of armor, its sole purpose being, as Tarzan later learned, to cover the soft, white bellies of the Horibs. Upon the breast of each garment was a strange device—an eight-pronged cross with a circle in the center. Around his waist each Horib wore a leather belt, which supported a scabbard in which was inserted a bone knife. About each wrist and above each elbow was a band or bracelet. These completed their apparel and ornaments. In addition to his knife each Horib carried a long lance shod with bone.

Joog the Giant of Mars

Joog, the Giant of Mars from “John Carter and the Giant of Mars” (Amazing Stories, January 1941) probably shouldn’t be on this list because it is just a giant after all. But I have a fondness for Joog, who isn’t evil but a pawn of Pew Mogel. I think Burroughs gave the Pulps the idea of the mad man riding on the giant’s head. Not since Gulliver had anyone changed the basic idea:

John Carter found himself looking into a monstrous face. From top of shaggy head to bottom of its hairy chin, the head measured fully fifteen feet. A new monstrosity had come to life on Mars. Judging by the adjacent buildings, the creature must have been a hundred and thirty feet tall!

Sabretooth Men

Sabretooth Men from “Return to Pellucidar” (Amazing Stories, February 1942) are like a new version of the monkey men from At the Earth’s Core:

The terrible creatures crept closer and closer to Hodon and O-aa. They were men, naked black men with long, prehensile tails. Their brows protruded above small, close-set eyes; and there was practically no head above the brows. Short, stiff black hair grew straight out from their skulls; but their outstanding feature was a pair of tusks that curved down from the upper jaw to below the chin.

The Mahars

The Mahars from At the Earth’s Core (All-Story Weekly, April 4-25, 1914) are the dominate race in Pellucidar before David Innes shows up:

As we descended the broad staircase which led to the main avenue of Phutra I caught my first sight of the dominant race of the inner world. Involuntarily I shrank back as one of the creatures approached to inspect us. A more hideous thing it would be impossible to imagine. The all-powerful Mahars of Pellucidar are great reptiles, some six or eight feet in length, with long narrow heads and great round eyes. Their beak-like mouths are lined with sharp, white fangs, and the backs of their huge, lizard bodies are serrated into bony ridges from their necks to the end of their long tails. Their feet are equipped with three webbed toes, while from the fore feet membranous wings, which are attached to their bodies just in front of the hind legs, protrude at an angle of 45 degrees toward the rear, ending in sharp points several feet above their bodies.

I picked the Mahars not so much for their looks, another dinosaur, but for their culture. This all-female race managed to enslave an entire world by using the sagoths as their army. The Mahars possess a kind of evil science as well. Though imagine mistaking one of these for your girl friend! (Tut tut, David!)

Plantmen

Plantman of Barsoom from The Gods of Mars (All-Story, January-May 1913) are Burroughs at his very finest. Creepy, truly alien, and such a menace, they make the opening of the book better than what follows:

The head, with the exception of the face, was covered by a tangled mass of jet-black hair some eight or ten inches in length. Each hair was about the bigness of a large angleworm, and as the thing moved the muscles of its scalp this awful head-covering seemed to writhe and wriggle and crawl about the fearsome face as though indeed each separate hair was endowed with independent life.

The body and the legs were as symmetrically human as Nature could have fashioned them, and the feet, too, were human in shape, but of monstrous proportions. From heel to toe they were fully three feet long, and very flat and very broad.

As it came quite close to me I discovered that its strange movements, running its odd hands over the surface of the turf, were the result of its peculiar method of feeding, which consists in cropping off the tender vegetation with its razorlike talons and sucking it up from its two mouths, which lie one in the palm of each hand, through its arm-like throats.

The Targo

The Targo from Pirates of Venus (Argosy, September 17-October 22, 1932) is the giant spider, of course, but this was five years before J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and six months before Robert E. Howard’s “The Tower of the Elephant” (Weird Tales, March 1933):

Presently there was a rustling among the foliage, and a face appeared some fifteen yards from us. It was a hideous face—the face of a spider tremendously enlarged. When the thing saw that we had discovered it, it emitted the most frightful scream I had ever heard save once before. Then I recognized them–the voice and the face. It had been a creature such as this that had pursued my pursuer the night that I had dropped to the causeway in front of the house of Duran.

The Tongzan

The Tongzan from Pirates of Venus (Argosy, September 17-October 22, 1932) is the other beastie Carson Napier meets upon arriving on Venus. This mixture of parts is so ludicrous I have to wonder if Burroughs was parodying himself or simply trying to see how far he could go in his monster-making efforts:

In the dim half-light of the Venusian night I saw confronting me a creature that might be conjured only in the halfdelirium of some horrid nightmare. It was about as large as a full-grown puma, and stood upon four handlike feet that suggested that it might be almost wholly arboreal. The front legs were much longer than the hind, suggesting, in this respect, the hyena; but here the similarity ceased, for the creature’s furry pelt was striped longitudinally with alternate bands of red and yellow, and its hideous head bore no resemblance to any earthly animal. No external ears were visible, and in the low forehead was a single large, round eye at the end of a thick antenna about four inches long. The jaws were powerful and armed with long, sharp fangs, while from either side of the neck projected a powerful chela. Never have I seen a creature so fearsomely armed for offense as was this nameless beast of another world. With those powerful crablike pincers it could easily have held an opponent far stronger than a man and dragged it to those terrible jaws.

The Vooyorgans

The Vooyorgans from “The Living Dead” (Fantastic Adventures, November 1941) gave us Burroughs’ most disgusting idea, people who reproduce by splitting in half like amoebas:

The creature’s struggles were now becoming violent; its groans and screams filled the vast chamber, echoing and re-echoing from the domed ceiling; and then, to my horror, I saw that the creature was splitting apart along the reddish median line I have described— right down the center of its head and body.

With a last, violent convulsion, the two halves rolled apart. There was no blood. Each half was protected by a thin, palpitating membrane, through which the internal organs were clearly observable. Almost immediately two stretchers were brought and the two halves were placed upon them and carried away. That both were still alive was evident, as I saw their limbs move.

The Wieroos

The Wieroos from Out of Time’s Abyss (Blue Book, December 1918) are the stage of evolution after human. I think people often forget the wonderful satire of Burroughs’ inventions. ERB is commenting on the direction we are headed in. Of course, for all their supposed superiority, Bradley bests them:

The creature stood about the height of an average man but appeared much taller from the fact that the joints of his long wings rose fully a foot above his hairless head. The bare arms were long and sinewy, ending in strong, bony hands with clawlike fingers—almost talonlike in their suggestiveness. The white robe was separated in front, revealing skinny legs and the further fact that the thing wore but the single garment, which was of fine, woven cloth. From crown to sole the portions of the body exposed were entirely hairless, and as he noted this, Bradley also noted for the first time the cause of much of the seeming expressionlessness of the creature’s countenance–it had neither eye-brows or lashes. The ears were small and rested flat against the skull, which was noticeably round, though the face was quite flat. The creature had small feet, beautifully arched and plump, but so out of keeping with every other physical attribute it possessed as to appear ridiculous.

Of course, these are my favorite Edgar Rice Burroughs monsters, but this doesn’t mean I don’t groove to malagors or mammoths or Amtorian tharbans and thoats or any of the other cool creatures. Burroughs knew how to keep the menace coming with claw and fang. And he inspired many others like Michael Moorcock (writing as Edward P. Bradbury), Lin Carter and Jack Vance’s Planet of Adventure.