The Mad King
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The whole of Ludstadt was in a vortex. The mad king escaped. For ten years, not a single one of them looked at the face of the child king, who was hurriedly taken to the gloomy fortress of Blenz after the death of his father, the old king. Barney Couster of Beatrice, the virtual twin of the crazy king Nebraska, has entered this troubled country. Burroughs wrote this complex story of identity and royal intrigues in 1914-15, just as the First World War was about to begin, and the events that led to the war, as Burroughs wrote, informed the book. It amounts to being a tribute to Anthony Hope's Zenda Prisoner, but the tide of war makes it a completely different story from Hope's almost bizarre novel.
