Tarzan and the Leopard Men

Tarzan and the Leopard Men was published in 1935 and brings the series back to a more grounded West African setting. The plot involves the Leopard Men, a real-world African secret society that conducted ritual murders into the early twentieth century, fictionalized into a paranoid organization of secret killers wearing leopard-skin disguises. The Leopard Men cult has been terrorizing the villages near Tarzan’s plantation.

A young American woman named Kali Bwana, looking for her missing brother, gets caught up in the Leopard Men’s territory. Tarzan, who is suffering from temporary memory loss after a head injury, ends up traveling with the Leopard Men as a captive, then as something resembling a recruit. The amnesia device is used more honestly here than in some earlier books, and the eventual restoration of his memory is well staged. The novel is more horror-tinged than most Tarzan books. Burroughs’s handling of African religious culture is mixed. Worth reading after the City of Gold for the contrast.