STEVE CARROLL WRITES

As a boy, I decided to indulge my love for Tarzan movies by acquiring and reading some of the original books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. W hen I was 10 years old, I received the first 5 Tarzan books in a slipcase for Christmas. These were the editions with cover art by Neal Adams and I dove in with   zealous fervor. I was so hooked that my first attempt at original writing was a Tarzan pastiche involving the apeman and dinosaurs that has sadly been   lost to the ravages of time, unlike my later attempt at a Kung Fu action adventure novel that still exists in a mostly intact form (all 176 hand-written pages   of it!). Years later I re-read almost the entire Tarzan run again along with much of Burroughs'   Mars   and   Venus   series and various trips to   Pellucidar . I found myself   genuinely marveling at what still works, while being aware of many of Burroughs' shortcomings. Action and sweep were abundant, along with heaping   doses of im...

The following column originally appeared in Justin Marriott's PAPERBACK FANATIC #50 (sadly the final edition of this fine publication), which was published in August of 2025. You can buy a copy of it  HERE . That article has been slightly expanded upon for this blog. The Horror!   The Horror! I   grew up in a household with a mother who regularly read true crime murder magazines. She got stacks of them from her own mother and I was absolutely terrified of them as an elementary-age child. Maybe that   macabre sense of normalcy in middle   American suburban life is what led Mom to be a very early adopter of reading   horror novels. That became much easier in the 70s as horror found a willing   playground in mainstream publishing that further blossomed in the 80s. As Mom   would read what seemed a particularly good scary book, she invariably allowed   me to follow suit. In retrospect, I’m   not sure that was wise parenting, but I   am ...