Toward the end of 2025, I picked up Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc.‘s new edition of The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs, along with Joshua Reynolds‘s authorized sequel, The Return of the Monster Men.
I had read The Monster Men way back in the 1970s. Mine was the Ace Books edition with the Boris Vallejo cover. It has a heroic-looking Number Thirteen/Bulan standing up against some uglies. I was looking at the other covers by other artists, J. Allen St. John, Frank Frazetta, Enric, etc. All the others emphasized the damsel being carried off by a monster, probably Number One.
I think most here are aware of the plot of The Monster Men. I’ve always considered this novel basically being Burroughs’s take on Dr. Frankenstein. It first appeared as “A Man Without a Soul” in All-Story Magazine (November 1913), but wasn’t reprinted in book form until 1929. Our Dr. Frankenstein is Professor Arthur Maxon, who is experimenting with creating artificial life instead of building life out of dead body parts. He hires a Dr. Carl von Horn to take him and his daughter Virginia to a remote island in the East Indies, where they set up a fort and begin work.
Prof. Maxon creates a series of artificial men in chemical vats, but all turn out mindless and ugly. Maxon hopes to create the perfect human being and wed Virginia to it. Von Horn hopes to get Virginia for himself. There is also the threat of the locals and a band of pirates.
When Number Thirteen emerges, he appears to be the perfect human Maxon was hoping for. But an emergency erupts. Number One has escaped and kidnapped Virginia. Going after her, Maxon, von Horn, and cook Sing Lee find that Number Thirteen has killed Number One and rescued Virginia.
Things get complicated when von Horn abducts Virginia, and the pirates attack, thinking a chest contains wealth. Thirteen, now called Bulan, and Maxon separately go after Virginia, with things complicated by the other creations of Maxon also in the mix. The action takes them all as far as Borneo for a final confrontation between Maxon, von Horn, Sing Lee, and Bulan, along with Virginia. And we learn that Bulan is NOT Number Thirteen, but an amnesiac that Sing Lee had found adrift in a boat and substituted for Number Thirteen. And we (and they) learn of the crimes of von Horn, who flees. Just as an American naval vessel arrives, it happens to be looking for von Horn to arrest him. He is found, headless, next to the stolen chest, which only contains books.
Bulan’s memory returns, and he now knows he is Townsend Harper Jr., a wealthy young man who had taken an interest in Virginia early in the novel. Like with several other ERB works, we expect them to wed and live happily ever after.
The Return of the Monster Men is an authorized sequel written by Joshua Reynolds. For those not aware, Reynolds has mainly been writing horror-related works. He has several works that tie into Arkham Horror, the H.P. Lovecraft/Cthulhu Mythos games from Fantasy Flight Games, and the occult detective Charles St. Cyprian, the Royal Occultist, which I’ve reviewed here.
Return, set 13 months after the original novel, finds Bulan (Townsend Harper Jr.) and Virginia (along with Sing Lee) return to the island in the East Indies to answer a question: what happened to Number Thirteen? After all, in the novel we are told that Sing Lee dumped out Number Thirteen and put Harper in its place. But nothing was said about what actually happened to it/him.
Unfortunately, they find that in the time they left the island, others have come to continue the work of Professor Maxon. Who they work for is unclear. But they have made their own series of creations, numbers one through eight. And Thirteen is around as well, now named “Otto,” as is Muda Saffir, the pirate.
Our main antagonist is Lt. Arkwright, who is in command of a group of British soldiers, working with a Professor Vogel. He gave Thirteen his name. Arkwright’s purpose for more monster men is clearly not the same as Maxon’s, though I got more Dr. Moreau vibes than Frankenstein this time. Creation Eight seems the most intelligent, and maybe the most dangerous. And things come to a violent conclusion, which should not come as a surprise.
When I initially read the ending, I thought they should have gone in a different direction, but then as I thought more about it, I felt that this ending was more in line with what Burroughs would have written vs. what most current authors would have done. Thus, I think this is the right ending, and this is overall a good sequel.
If you haven’t read The Monster Men, do check it out. They’ve also done a comic-strip adaptation on the ERB Inc. website.
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