Tarzan the Terrible
Series: Tarzan 8
Reviewed date: 2013 Jan 7
Rating: 2
306 pages
At the end of Tarzan the Untamed, we discover that Jane is not dead after all. She's been kidnapped, and Tarzan follows her into the heart of the prehistoric African land of Pal-ul-don.
In Pal-ul-don, carnivorous Triceratops roam the jungle. The natives are pithecanthropi with prehensile tails. Tarzan befriends a Waz-don tribe of black pithecanthropi and earns their trust. Later, he makes his way to the Ho-don city peopled by white pithecanthropi, where he impersonates Dor-ul-otho, the son of their great god Jad-ben-otho. Tarzan tries to play the king and the chief priest off each other, but manages to bungle it, and gets taken captive.
He escapes, of course. And elsewhere, Jane escapes from the Ho-don as well, and makes a decent show of surviving alone in the jungle. Both Jane and Tarzan are eventually recaptured by the Ho-don, and are sentenced to be sacrificed to Jad-ben-otho. Just when all seems lost, Jack shows up with a rifle and rains death upon the evil priests of Pal-ul-don. In a surprise that we all saw coming, Jack has been tracking his parents for the whole book, and shows up just in the nick of time.