Tarzan the Precipice by Michael Sanderson

 This is a post that should have been made literally years ago. I met Michael Sanderson at a Burroughs convention, where he gave a talk about the book and what inspired it. It is a pastiche officially liscensed by the ERB estate. It has been a while since I actually read the book, though I enjoyed it, my memory of it has since become a tad rusty. 

    The novel fits into the canonical tales neatly between the first and second Tarazan novels, and has the ape-man making a foray into the uncharted Canadian wilds. This being ERB's universe, this story has all the ingredients of an authentic Burroughs tale. This tale's heroine-in peril is a beautiful ashen (or platinum, as the two are almost the same) blonde who parents intend to marry her into the British upper class. When their train crashes in the Canadian wilderness, Gunderson survives and flees, only to (of course) run afoul of two very vile thugs named Lennie and Skinner. While the name "London Gunderson" didn't at first conjure up the vision of  beautiful Burroughs babe, somehow the name is very appropriate, with something of the ring of "Victoria Custer" to it. Don't ask me why, but it works. According to the author, "London" was modeled on a actual person, a female friend of his who was in the audience. Now forgive me, here, I can't recall if it was his wife, girlfriend, or what, only the the character was based on her. 

   In regard to the two villains, what stood about them the most was that they somewhat recalled George and Lenny from Steinbeck's Mice and Men, the difference being that these two are extremely evil and sadistic. London survives her encounter of course, thanks to Tarzan of the Apes. In addition to the pair of villains, Tarzan also tangles with, and partly befriends both a the warriors of a lost Viking colony and tribe of Sasquatch, the latter of whom speak a variant of Mangani, and understand Tarzan, as do all primates in Burroughs universe. It's also evident here that lost colonies of ancient cultures survive not just in Africa, but in North America was well, and possibly all over the globe. One incident in a pastiche I wrote had an explanation as to why Tarzan's (or Greystoke's, since I couldn't use the copyrighted name), Africa contained so many lost worlds and civilizations. But the same phenomena seems to exist all over the world. Witness the Land of Hidden Men deep within the continent of Asia, and doubtless other forgotten civilization exist in the even vaster continent, but Burroughs only wrote two Asian novels, that and Tarzan and Foreign Legion. 

    All in all, Tarzan on the Precipice manages to be a very Burroughsian novel.