Monster Men, The

Serve yourself, your children with the tools that seed intuitive thinking skills, books that challenge and enrich the imagination. Take them back to the time before the mind-controlling television and electronic games to the origins of the ideas that gave birth to these electronic miracles. - BOOKS that fuel the creative processes of the human imagination. Edgar Rice Burroughs was one such man and author that enriched the minds of many a person.

EXCERPT

THE RIFT

As he dropped the last grisly fragment of the dismembered and mutilated body into the small vat of nitric acid that was to devour every trace of the horrid evidence which might easily send him to the gallows, the man sank weakly into a chair and throwing his body forward upon his great, teak desk buried his face in his arms, breaking into dry, moaning sobs.

Beads of perspiration followed the seams of his high, wrinkled forehead, replacing the tears which might have lessened the pressure upon his overwrought nerves. His slender frame shook, as with ague, and at times was racked by a convulsive shudder.

A sudden step upon the stairway leading to his workshop brought him trembling and wide eyed to his feet, staring fearfully at the locked and bolted door.

Although he knew perfectly well whose the advancing footfalls were, he was all but overcome by the madness of apprehension as they came softly nearer and nearer to the barred door. At last they halted before it, to be followed by a gentle knock.

"Daddy!" came the sweet tones of a girl's voice. The man made an effort to take a firm grasp upon himself that no tell-tale evidence of his emotion might be betrayed in his speech.

"Daddy!" called the girl again, a trace of anxiety in her voice this time. "What IS the matter with you, and what ARE you doing? You've been shut up in that hateful old room for three days now without a morsel to eat, and in all likelihood without a wink of sleep.

You'll kill yourself with your stuffy old experiments."

The man's face softened.

"Don't worry about me, sweetheart," he replied in a well controlled voice. "I'll soon be through now - soon be through - and then we'll go away for a long vacation - for a long vacation."

"I'll give you until noon, Daddy," said the girl in a voice which carried a more strongly defined tone of authority than her father's soft drawl, "and then I shall come into that room, if I have to use an axe, and bring you out - do you understand?"

Professor Maxon smiled wanly. He knew that his daughter was equal to her threat.

"All right, sweetheart, I'll be through by noon for sure - by noon for sure. Run along and play now, like a good little girl."

Virginia Maxon shrugged her shapely shoulders and shook her head hopelessly at the forbidding panels of the door.

About the Author

Edgar Rice Burroughs is one of the world's most popular authors. With no previous experience as an author, he wrote and sold his first novel--'A Princess of Mars' in 1912. In the ensuing thirty-eight years until his death in 1950, Burroughs wrote ninety-one books and a host of short stories and articles. Although best known as the creator of the classic Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars, his restless imagination knew few bounds. Burroughs's prolific pen ranged from the American West to primitive Africa and on to romantic adventure on the moon, the planets, and even beyond the farthest star.

No one knows how many copies of ERB books have been published throughout the world. It is conservative to say, however, that with the translations into thirty-two known languages, including Braille, the number must ran into the hundreds of millions. When one considers the additional worldwide following of the Tarzan newspaper feature, radio programs, comic magazines, motion pictures, and television, Burroughs must have been known and loved by literally a thousand million or more.

Edgar Rice Burroughs commenced writing a "contemporary" tale about adventure in the south seas in 1913. The first part was called THE CAVE GIRL and originally appeared in THE ALL-STORY magazine for July, August, and September 1913. Its sequel, THE CAVE MAN appeared in serial fashion in 1917; both parts were later collected in hard cover in 1925 by A. C. McClurg & Co.