2013/04/04

Mummies in Fiction

Following up on the Bog Bodies post, it turns out that, although there is a significant amount of fiction involving Egyptian mummies, it is largely horror fiction.  Egyptian mummies do not turn up in crime/mystery novels the way bog bodies do.

I did not search for long before I found a good list by the Monster Librarian, Mummy Horror Titles, including, if you really are curious, The Essential Guide to Mummy Literature, by Brian J. Frost, (2007).  The Monster Librarian, by the way, has a fine web site that is worth exploring.  I found an interesting H.P. Lovecraft Collection Development Guide.

I don't much care about fictional mummies.  I guess they are a bit like zombies, but without the contagion factor, and with the added "mummy's curse."

I found a very interesting look at the mummy as a subject for horror fiction, The Curse of The Mummy in Modern Horror Fiction, by horror writer KC Redding-Gonzalez:
Anne Rice is the only modern author to tackle a full-length novel of the Mummy in her well-received and bestselling 1989 title, The Mummy, or Ramses The Damned. There is also a film remake from 1999 titled The Mummy directed by Stephen Sommers (starring Brendan Fraser), a re-telling of the 1932 Karloff film. But there are few other takers outside of the short story format, which itself offers few and too far between anthologies with the Mummy as centerpiece. The scarcity of Mummy tales is the indicator of a sea change in the genre and in audience sophistication.
 

3 comments:

Lucy R. Fisher said...

I remember a good anthology of mummy short stories (one by Conan Doyle??? the original of all the mummy movies with revivification scenes in the British Museum). It was in a series (others covered zombies and werewolves). Wish I still had them.

Lucy R. Fisher said...

Here y'are:

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/rngthoth.htm

Brett said...

It's an interesting story, thanks. It reminds me of the Order of the Golden Dawn, active in Paris at the time. And of course Doyle did truly believe in those spirits waiting "at the other side of the veil."