Jongor of Lost Land

Robert Moore Williams Jongor of Lost Land (1942)
This has been a very pleasant surprise. The cover seems to promise Tarzan with the serial numbers filed off, which is sort of what it is, a bit, but not quite. Much as I love the work of Robert Moore Williams - what I've read of it - I'm under no illusions regarding his membership status within the canon of science-fiction sausage machines churning them out back in the thirties and forties, so it was difficult to get too excited about the prospect of this one beyond the possibility of the author's characteristic narrative brainfarts to liven things up.

In the negative, it's kind of pulpy, but we knew that and wouldn't be reading if it was a problem. You can probably guess at least some of what happens just from the cover.

And yes, it really is more or less Tarzan, but Tarzan under the influence of Abraham Merritt rather than Edgar Rice Burroughs, meaning we get a Shaver-esque degenerate race which has inherited the lost city of a once great civilisation, superscientific crystals of power, mysterious rays, mind control, dinosaurs borrowed from The Lost World, and a story which is short, punchy, genuinely weird and massively satisfying. It takes peculiar random swerves as do most of Robert Moore Williams' books, but he's reigned it in a little with this one keeping it all on the coherent side of crazy, more or less; and, frankly, it's better written than Tarzan, greatly more imaginative, and almost completely lacking in any equivalent to Burroughs' dull racist chortling over the slapstick antics of dumb savages. Jongor is astonishingly original for something composed almost exclusively of familiar pulp tropes.