The Gods of Mars

The Gods of Mars was published in 1913 and picks up John Carter’s story ten years after the events of A Princess of Mars. Carter has been trying for a decade to return to Barsoom and finally manages it. He lands not in the safe wastes near the Thark hordes but in the legendary Valley Dor at the south pole, the supposed afterlife of the Martian religion. It turns out the religious paradise is a fraud and a slaughterhouse, run by the white-skinned Therns who use the myth to drain the souls of religious pilgrims.

Carter spends most of the novel uncovering this fraud, escaping from successive Thern strongholds, discovering the even deeper conspiracy of the First Born race of black Martians, and racing to rescue his now-grown son Carthoris and his old friend Tars Tarkas. The book ends on one of the more notorious cliffhangers in early pulp fiction, with Dejah Thoris trapped in a temple about to be killed and the reader waiting twelve months for the next book. Sequel-worthy in a way the original was not, and as foundational to planetary romance.