Tarzan the Terrible

Tarzan Series, Book 8

By: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Narrated by: Rusty Nelson

Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's Summary

In this novel two months have gone by, and Tarzan is continuing to search for Jane. He has tracked her to a hidden valley called Pal-ul-don, which means "Land of Men." In Pal-ul-don Tarzan finds a real Jurassic Park filled with dinosaurs, notably the savage Triceratops-like Gryfs, which, unlike their prehistoric counterparts, are predatory. Jane is also being held captive in Pal-ul-don, where she becomes a pawn in a religious power struggle. Tarzan continues to pursue the rescue of his beloved, going through an extended series of fights and escapes to do so. In the end success seems beyond even his ability to achieve.

Public Domain (P)2015 Books in Motion

Odd

This book is not for me. at first, I wondered if, for this volume, Burroughs stopped caring if readers enjoyed the story or not. most of it looks like a digression from the story-arch begun in the previous volume. By the end of the book I was convinced that he cared. I just need to remember that it was originally pulp fiction, Burroughs wrote so much so quickly that he had to lay some eggs. He couldn't always be inventing startlingly original world's and characters.

Tarzan is tracking down, to rescue, his kidnapped wife and ends up in a land with two races of hairy cavemen, one with and one without tails, and carnivorous triceratops that Tarzan is able to ride. The book goes on and on with an adventure showing Tarzan among the infighting cavemen instead of showing him track down his wife. It is seven hours into the audiobook before Jane is shown. That seems like an unbalanced story to me.

The reading performance is particularly bad in my opinion. The talent has very little acting range. I think it is an odd choice to pick a narrator who sounds like he is a Texan or someone who usually reads westerns for this story about an English Lord. It is weird to hear Tarzan sound like a Texan when he speaks. Worse still is the sound the reader portrays Tarzan as making when he is attracting the attention of a triceratops so a woman can escape from a tree. The sound is exactly the noise a farmer uses to call a pig. The effect of this reading undermines the gravitas of Tarzan as a god-like giant, genius, and amazing warrior that is presented in the earlier books and the readings of them in other audiobooks. The voice the reader makes for the cavemen is embarrassing to listen to.

This performance surprised me because the Books in Motion recordings of Burroughs 's Mucker series, read by Gene Engene, is excellent.

The combination of this book and performance make it among the worst audio books that I have listened to over the past couple of decades.