It's been a warm week, though we've got a cooler breeze now But I've been taking the dogs out earlier and later in the day to dodge the heat. Reading-wise: finished Middlemarch, which I loved, and I'm nearly done with Tom Cox's The Villager, which I mentioned last week. Also re-skimmed through Lud-in-the-Mist, Andre Norton's Dread Companion, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's Kingdoms of Elfin. You'll gather I'm in a fae period at the moment — though these are all dangerous fae. I'm even concocting a D&D campaign out of it, which I'll be running through Roll20.
Hey! You thought I was going to talk to you about ghosts! It's too sunny and warm. But there are other horrors more at home in the heat and glare.
A Short History of Mummy Stories
I've just finished recording "A Professor of Egyptology" by Guy Boothby — Cairo in the winter season, a young woman falling under the spell of a scholar whose knowledge of the dead runs rather deeper than any book could teach. It's 1904, it's restrained, and nobody so much as raises a bandaged hand in anger. Turns out that's exactly how the genre behaved at that point. The shambling, murderous mummy you're picturing — and the CGI action-adventure it eventually became, all rolling boulders and Brendan Fraser — came much later. It was grafted onto something that started out as a completely different kind of story.
Starts, oddly, with a teenager. In 1827, twenty-year-old Jane C. Loudon wrote a novel called The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, part Frankenstein pastiche, part satire. She got some of the idea from a very Regency form of entertainment — this is a good decade before Victoria even took the throne — the mummy unwrapping party. Wealthy collectors would buy a mummy at auction, invite guests round, and have it unrolled as after-dinner spectacle. Often to general disappointment, since it just lay there being three thousand years old and doing nothing. They also used to eat mummia — crushed-up mummy — as medicine, which tells you something about Regency medicine as much as anything else.
By the time the fashion had properly taken hold and matured into a full Victorian craze, if you couldn't afford your own mummy to unwrap, you could read a story about one instead.
For most of the century, though, what fiction actually gave people wasn't horror. It was romance. The mummies who came back to life were mostly young women — a queen, a princess, a beauty preserved past all reason, waiting for the right man's devotion to wake her. Conan Doyle wrote one of these himself, "The Ring of Thoth," in 1890. Rider Haggard wrote several. Boothby's professor sits comfortably in that tradition — the danger was seductive, not gruesome.
Then Doyle changed his mind. "Lot No. 249," 1892, is by most accounts the first English story to make a reanimated mummy actually dangerous — an Oxford student sends his mummy after his enemies, has to burn it to stop it. No curse, no tomb, no Carter. Just a man, a papyrus scroll, and old-fashioned malice. Worth remembering, next time someone tells the mummy's-curse story as if it started in a Cairo dig — the vengeful mummy was already out there before Carter ever opened a tomb.
That said, Carter really was rocket fuel for the whole mummy industry. November 1922, he opens the burial chamber of Tutankhamun, and the world does not calm down about it for years. Lord Carnarvon, who financed the dig, dies within months — of sepsis from a mosquito bite, if you want the boring truth, but "curse" sounds so much better and the papers agreed. One of the journalists covering the story was a man called John Balderston, who a decade later ends up writing a screenplay for Universal, fresh off Dracula and Frankenstein and short a third monster. He'd covered the tomb opening as a reporter, knew all the curse stories, and just built them straight into the script.
The result, 1932's The Mummy, gave Boris Karloff one of his great roles as Imhotep, welded Doyle's vengeful mummy onto the real-life Carnarvon panic, and set the template the genre's been running on ever since — sequels through the '40s, Hammer's run in the '50s and '60s, and eventually the 1999 reboot that turned the whole thing into blockbuster spectacle, chariots and all, with barely a scrap of the original melancholy surviving. Might have been Karloff's performance that sealed it in as a top-tier monster. Might just as easily have been the make-up effects. Probably both.
Boothby's mummy story is about longing. The one Hollywood built is about trespass and punishment — the price of opening something that should've stayed shut. Different stories, same itch really: wanting to reach back through time and get hold of something you shouldn't be able to get back. Boothby lets his professor get away with it. Karloff's Imhotep never quite manages the trick, however many centuries and sequels he's given to practice.
If you want more of this mood, try Algernon Blackwood's "The Descent into Egypt" — lyrical, horror-stricken, a bit philosophical, about a man's soul getting slowly eaten by his love of ancient Egypt. My reading of it's in the podcast archive.
Recommendation: The Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin
Another book with the same sunny, Arabian horror vibe (though no mummies as I recall) is:
Another book in roughly the same vein — no mummies, as far as I recall — is The Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin. It first read it when it came out, then again in Cairo itself a couple of years later, which is either the best or worst place to read it.
Irwin was a proper Arabist — Oxford history, postgrad at SOAS under Bernard Lewis, a stint in a dervish monastery in Algeria before he gave up academia to write fiction. All that scholarship is in the book, but it's not showing off about it. Set in Mamluk Cairo, 1486, an English spy called Balian arrives in the city, falls asleep, and can't quite find his way back out of his own dreams — the "Arabian Nightmare" of the title being an affliction where you get dreams of pure horror and never remember them on waking. Irwin nicked the nested structure quite deliberately from the Thousand and One Nights — story folded into story into story, each one cut off before it resolves.
This isn't just a stalling tactic. Scheherazade survives by never finishing — the story-within-the-story is a stay of execution, and not knowing is the whole point of it. Every extra layer is another door you have to find your way back through, and a few stories deep you've half forgotten which room you came in by. Irwin does it well enough that you get genuinely dizzy — you stop trusting that any given story is the real one, which is exactly what's wrong with his hero. It's a much older trick than modernism likes to take credit for — Potocki was doing it in The Manuscript Found in Saragossa back in the early 1800s [on my to read shelf] , and Irwin borrowed from that too.
Same unmoored feeling always puts me in mind of Tim Powers — The Anubis Gates specifically, his 1983 time-travel novel where a stranded academic gets tangled up with Egyptian sorcerers trying to topple the British Empire by dragging Anubis and friends forward through holes torn in time. Rollicking, plot-drunk book, closer to adventure than dream-logic, but it's got that same feeling of a story about to swallow its own hero whole. Same year, as it happens — 1983 for both — so probably not one influencing the other, more something in the water.
Read a more recent stab at the tradition last year — Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad, a corpse stitched together from war dead in occupied Baghdad that won't stay dead or stay still. Well made, won its prizes fairly, but it didn't grip me the way the older stuff does. I suspect I'm simply old.
Irwin died in June 2024, and this was still the book everyone reached for first when they wrote about him.
From the Shadows: A True (?) Account of a Mummy Haunting
There's a mummy case in the British Museum that's never actually contained a mummy. Just a coffin lid, believed to be a priestess of Amun-Ra — and it's been blamed, at various points, for a servant's broken arm, a photographer's suicide, and the sinking of the Titanic.
It started with two Victorian gentlemen with an interest in the occult, who noticed a resemblance between the coffin lid and another mummy said to have haunted an English drawing room, smashing crockery until someone locked it in a cupboard. From there it just grew — men who drew lots for the thing and then walked into the desert and vanished, lost a limb, lost a fortune, lost the house to fire. By the time it got to the museum, night watchmen were reporting scratching and sobbing from inside the case, objects flung about the gallery, colleagues dropping dead in quick succession.
None of it's true, as far as I've ever established — the museum's always said the object never left the building, never mind boarded a ship. But the Titanic version was doing the rounds within days of the sinking, and it stuck so hard the coffin lid's still known as the Unlucky Mummy. Sits in Room 62 behind glass, doing absolutely nothing, and still gets asked about more than almost anything else in the Egyptian collection. You can go and see it. I did.
But all this was never really was about the dead. It was always about what the living can't stop imagining the dead will do.
Looking for something to listen to? Check out the archive.
Fancy hunting through the back catalogue? The full story archive is searchable at classicghost.com — hundreds of stories, sortable by author.
Wishing you a happy week or so and lots of good listening, reading or viewing. Remember life isn't just about working, it's about having a little time for pleasure, beauty and indeed what the ill-informed might call idleness.
As ever,
Tony
