Although there aren’t any psychedelic mushrooms in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Cave Girl, it’s still a fun book. Basically, a wheezy, wimpy, uptight city dweller named Waldo is swept overboard during a Pacific sea journey and fetches up on an island of Neolithic savages. He meets a girl and the rest of the book involves him turning into Rambo in order to defend her from the men of her own undeserving (obviously) tribe. Ultimately it turns out she was never a savage, but rather a regular white chick born on the island twenty years earlier to a shipwrecked American woman. The woman died and the girl was raised as an islander. So it’s a good thing Waldo washed ashore to keep those primitives from defiling her flesh.

Burroughs helped pioneer the entire Lost World genre, so despite its flaws, The Cave Girl is worth a read for that reason alone. It began as two separate stories in 1914, was melded into a novel in 1925, and in 1949 was released in the Dell paperback edition you see above, with the title shortened to simply Cave Girl, and with cover art by Jean des Vignes. Interesting and action-packed, this one should keep you entertained for a couple of days, and it’s in the public domain, which means you can download it.