When I began research on plant monsters I initially thought there would be Tarzan stories or comics or something in it. I naturally associated plant monsters and the killer vine in particular with jungle adventure. But the truth of it is there are not very many jungle lords who encounter plant monsters, especially in the works about Tarzan. This British collector card (above) got me wondering, how many are there, if any? And why did I naturally think the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs would include an encounter with a killer plant? Let’s explore.
Burroughs did use one plant monster very late in his career. This was in “The Skeleton Men of Jupiter” (Amazing Stories, February 1943) where John Carter encounters one on the planet Jupiter:
Just then a hideous scream broke from above us. I looked up, expecting to see some strange, Jupiterian beast above me, but there was nothing but the writhing limbs and the staring eyes of the great blossoms of the man-trees.
Han Du laughed. “Their nervous systems are of a low order,” he said, “and their reactions correspondingly slow and sluggish. It took all this time for the pain of my sword cut to reach the brain of the blossom to which that limb belongs.” “A man’s life would never be safe for a moment in such a forest,” I commented. “One has to be constantly on guard,” admitted Han Du. “If you ever have to sleep out in the woods, build a smudge. The blossoms don’t like smoke. They close up, and then they cannot see to attack you. But be sure that you don’t oversleep your smudge.”
Vegetable life on Jupiter, practically devoid of sunlight, has developed along entirely different lines from that on earth. Nearly all of it has some animal attributes and nearly all of it is carnivorous, the smaller plants devouring insects, the larger, in turn, depending upon the larger animals for sustenance on up to the maneaters such as I had encountered and those which Han Du said caught and devoured even the hugest animals that exist upon this strange planet.