Tarzan Triumphant

Tarzan Triumphant was published in 1932 and continues directly from Tarzan the Invincible. Zora Drinov and the remains of the Soviet expedition are still wandering the African interior, having lost most of their original purpose. They stumble across the Land of Midian, a small isolated valley populated by religious extremists descended from runaway slaves who follow a paranoid Christian theology of their own invention.

The Midian sections include some of Burroughs’s most unsettling religious-cult writing. The Midianites are bigamous, paranoid, and ritually violent. They periodically sacrifice outsiders. Wayne and Jane Colt, the American couple from the previous book, are taken captive there. Tarzan and Zora Drinov enter the valley to rescue them. The book is shorter than some of the others and runs on a tighter premise. Burroughs’s handling of religious extremism is more honestly conflicted than his handling of most political topics. An interesting late-period entry that deserves more attention than it usually gets.