By Duane Spurlock
Vengeance Trail: Wilderness # 7; Death Hunt: Wilderness # 8; Mountain Devil: Wilderness # 9; Blackfoot Massacre: Wilderness # 10; Northwest Passage: Wilderness # 11; Apache Blood: Wilderness # 12 by David Thompson (New York: Leisure Books, various years).
In "The Wilderness Series Launch," a brief review of the first six novels in the Wilderness series by David Thompson (aka David Robbins) elsewhere on The Pulp Rack, I mentioned that I think Robbins learned a few tricks from Edgar Rice Burroughs on how to end a chapter with a cliffhanger. This time around, let's take a look at some other points Robbins picked up from Burroughs.
Burroughs' books sometimes offered scathing social comment disguised as adventure fiction. For instance, anytime Tarzan met up with people from civilized nations such as Britain or the United States, the characteristics and foibles of the civilized life frequently ended up appearing less attractive and less honest than the primal lifestyle of Tarzan and the other jungle dwellers. In Tarzan and the Lion Man, Burroughs lampoons the Hollywood industry that helped make his creation a worldwide sensation. In books of his other series – Pellucidar, Barsoom, Caspak, and so forth – Burroughs pokes at political systems, religious hierarchies, and similar cultural and social infrastructures.
Robbins' social comparisons are usually less scathing than Burroughs' skewering, but his hero, Nate King, frequently perceives – and points out – how out of step with the natural world, with family, and with simple humanness are the lives of people from the civilized East who venture into the frontier. Greenhorns not only are a danger to themselves in the deadly wilderness that existed east of the Mississippi in the first half of the 19th Century, they pose dangers to those around them, including the savvy mountain man who tries to help them. For instance, in Mountain Devil, the eastern trappers who King agrees to help refuse to consider the dangers that their quest creates for the entire party – their greed and vanity blinds them to the notion that their very egos are creating more dangers than the usual ones an experienced mountain man might encounter.
In another book, Northwest Passage, King agrees to guide a party of pioneers to Oregon. The headstrong leaders of the group who have hired Nate continually disagree with King's decisions, which are based on his years of experience on the frontier and on getting the group safely through the wilderness to its destination. The civilized crew's stiff-necked refusal to divest itself of its civilized ways in the face of a world based on completely different rules creates dissension and deadly crises that King must face and fight through time and again.
To lend excitement to the many-volumed Tarzan series, Burroughs had his character continually encounter new societies (usually in the form of a lost race or city for each volume) whose unfamiliarity to his hero creates new dilemmas. Burroughs did the same for John Carter in the Barsoom series – particularly the first three books in the series – and Carson Napier in the Venus series.
Robbins does something similar in the Wilderness series. While most frequently King must contend with murderous warriors from the Blackfoot, Piegan, Blood, or Utes tribes, he sometimes encounters other tribes for the first time. For instance, in Apache Blood, he travels to Santa Fe for the first time – encountering the Mexican society there – and must deal with Apache raiding parties, who steal his son and wife as well as the wives of friends. Like John Carter's first trip to Barsoom in A Princess of Mars, King's tracking the Apaches in their territory is full of new types of landscape and difficulties for him.
Burroughs' heroes sometimes must battle monsters. Barsoom is full of monsters, as is Carson Napier's Venus. Tarzan frequently deals with creatures whose strength and ferocity seem greater than his own – his battle as a youth with the enraged ape king Kerchak in Tarzan of the Apes is but the first of many such fights. So Robbins' King must deal with monsters.
From the first book in the Wilderness series, Nate King seems fated to encounter and battle giant-sized grizzlies on occasion. It is from the first such encounter that he earns his nickname Grizzly Killer from a traveling Cheyenne warrior who witnesses the uneven fight.
In a manner closer to what Burroughs did with John Carter on Mars, Robbins pits King against a deadly and very mysterious threat in Mountain Devil. Here King learns from his wily old mentor Shakespeare McNair and from an aged Indian warrior about a part of the Rocky Mountain range that is shunned by all the tribes – even the most belligerent – because of the deadly Dweller who lives there. No one knows who or what that Dweller might be, but everyone knows that the Dweller is dangerous – few visitors to the valley have ever returned alive. Robbins manages his tale with a fine hand that doesn't stretch the credibility of his historical series beyond reasonable limits.
The volumes in Robbins' Wilderness series already number in the 40s (at this writing). Carrying a series that far means a writer must rely on creativity and freshness to keep readers following its new entries. In the first dozen Wilderness novels, Robbins does a good job of keeping things new and interesting for his characters and his readers. Clearly he's learned his writer's lessons well.
Links
Read "The Wilderness Series Launch" elsewhere on The Pulp Rack by clicking here.
For more info -- and I mean a LOT of info -- about Edgar Rice Burroughs, visit Bill Hillman's great ERB web site, ERBzine, by clicking here.
Purchase a Wilderness Double Edition of Vengeance Trail and Death Hunt at Amazon.com by clicking here.
Buy Mountain Devil at Amazon.com by clicking here, or a Double Edition with both Mountain Devil and Blackfoot Massacre by clicking here.
Buy a Double Edition of Northwest Passage and Apache Blood at Amazon.com by clicking here.
Posted by ds at January 28, 2006 08:42 AM
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