The Mammoth Book of the Mummy
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The Mammoth Book of the Mummy
Edited by Paula Guran
For everyone who, through whatever route, became fascinated with mummies instead of thinking they were just creepy.
Copyright © 2017 Paula Guran.
Cover art by Poprotskiy Alexey.
Cover design by Stephen H. Segal.
Ebook design by Neil Clarke.
ISBN: 978-1-60701-483-6 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-60701-482-9 (trade paperback)
PRIME BOOKS
Germantown, MD
www.prime-books.com
No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.
For more information, contact Prime Books at prime@prime-books.com.
All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors, and used here with their permission.
Contents
Introduction: My Mouth Has Been Given to Me That I May Speak by Paula Guran
Private Grave 9 by Karen Joy Fowler
The Good Shabti by Robert Sharp
Egyptian Revival by Angela Slatter
The Queen in Yellow by Kage Baker
On Skua Island by John Langan
Ramesses on the Frontier by Paul Cornell
The Shaddowwes Box by Terry Dowling
Egyptian Avenue by Kim Newman
The Curious Case of the Werewolf That Wasn’t,the Mummy That Was, and the Cat in the Jar by Gail Carriger
The Night Comes On by Steve Duffy
American Mummy by Stephen Graham Jones
Bubba-Ho-Tep by Joe R. Lansdale
Fruit of the Tomb: A Midnight Louie Past Life Adventure by Carole Nelson Douglas
The Chapter of Coming Forth by Night by Lois Tilton & Noreen Doyle
The Mummy’s Heart by Norman Partridge
The Emerald Scarab by Keith Taylor
The Embalmer by Helen Marshall
Tollund by Adam Roberts
Three Memories of Death by Will Hill
About the Authors
Acknowledgements
About the Editor
Introduction: My Mouth Has Been Given to Me That I May Speak
Paula Guran
Any corpse with well-preserved flesh is considered a mummy. Mummification may be deliberate or accidental. Extreme cold, dryness, and lack of oxygen are all natural conditions that may result in mummification. Intentional exposure to chemicals—embalming—as practiced by the ancient Egyptians produced the “bandaged” mummy that is now iconic.
Human mummies, anthropogenic or spontaneous, have been found on every continent except Antarctica—and naturally mummified seals have been found even there. Some of the best-preserved mummies come from European bogs.
There are a handful of fictional non-Egyptian mummy tales, but the vast preponderance of pop cultural mummies in all media are based on the Egyptian model.
The Egyptians were not preoccupied with death; they loved life and wanted it to continue forever. For those with means to afford the expensive and complex process of mummification, it was a way of ensuring one survived in the afterlife.
The journey to the next life was fraught with danger. Spells, amulets, rituals, and funerary figurines were provided to assist the deceased to make his or her way to Osiris, god of the netherworld and the first mummy. There, the deceased would face the judgment of the Weighing of the Heart. The heart of the dead was placed on a scale balanced against the feather of Maat—the fundamental order of the universe, justice, and truth personified as a goddess. If the scales balanced, immortality was achieved; if not, Ammit—a monster part lion, hippopotamus, and crocodile—devoured the heart and one’s chance for eternal life ended.
The Egyptian concept of spirit or soul was complicated (and not fully understood today). Very basically, the body was preserved to continue providing a host for the soul.
Mummification occurred in Egypt as far back as prehistoric times, but the earliest mummies were probably an accidental result of Egypt’s hot dry climate. Around 2600 BCE, Egyptians began to intentionally mummify the dead. The process varied over the ages, but remained complex and expensive. Royalty and the elite were mummified, the average and poor had to rely on incantations and spells to reach the afterlife.
Sometimes pets were mummified, as were, for religious reasons, several kinds of animals.
Mummies have acquired meaning and symbolism quite separate from their value as a source of historic knowledge and tangible connection with the past. They are part of an obsession with the civilization once centered on the Nile River. This passion began with the ancient Greeks and, through the ages, continued in Western culture. Egyptomania has manifested in many ways: the fine arts; architecture; design; the beliefs of occultists, philosophy, politics, religion, science (both sensible and pseudo-), and society. It has played—for better or worse—a part in the discourse of race and, according to some, even the national identity of the USA.
Two major waves of Egyptomania have washed over the West in the last two centuries or so. The first followed Napoleon Bonaparte’s attempt to conquer Egypt (1798–1801). Along with some thirty-four thousand soldiers, the invader’s ships carried more than one hundred and sixty civilians: biologists, mineralogists, linguists, mathematicians, chemists, botanists, zoologists, surveyors, economists, artists, poets, and other scholars. The campaign was a military disaster, but became a cultural triumph. The scholars, known as “savants,” produced the encyclopedic Description de l’Égypte. Its twenty-three volumes, published from 1809 to 1828, included information on plants, animals, geology, geography, mineralogy, and—most importantly—descriptions and engravings conveying the glories of ancient Egypt.
The high price, lengthy period of publication, limited number of copies, and large physical format of Description de l’Égypte confined accessibility primarily to the elite, but it and other more available publications became part of the fuel that fired general public interest in ancient Egypt.
The savants also collected antiquities, but when the French occupation ended in 1801, many of these were confiscated by the triumphant British army in the name of King George III. Among these treasures was a stele that came to be known as the Rosetta Stone. Jean-François Champollion’s decipherment of its ancient Egyptian texts (first published in 1824) added to the hunger for objects, monuments, and more.
Unfortunately, during the nineteenth century many of the techniques employed to find pieces of Egypt’s past were destructive and sometimes felonious. Nevertheless, they added greatly to the world’s knowledge. Mummies were included among the many artifacts shipped back to museums.
In the 1840s, steamships made travel to Egypt feasible. Wealthy tourists brought mummies back as souvenirs and public and private “mummy unwrapping parties” became fashionable.
For those of lesser means, advances in printing technology resulted in larger and cheaper editions of travelogues, memoirs, and other literature concerning Egypt. Newspapers and periodicals covered the discoveries of Egyptologists. Europeans and Americans were enthralled with the idea of Egypt and fascinated by its mummies. The tantalizing thought of a mummy brought back to life began appearing, not surprisingly, in fiction.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, four main themes began fermenting in mummy fiction: reanimation, reincarnation, a love that lasts beyond death, and a mummy’s curse that brought vengeance from the past.
As far as we know, the idea of a reanimated mummy would have never occurred to the ancient Egyptians. Mummies were still people of a sort. How can one bring life to the already living?
Mummies, their coffins, and masks are lifelike and seem to
have the potential for reanimation. At the same time, these preserved remains defy what Westerners see as a natural cycle—“ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” That which is not “normal,” including mummies, can easily slip into the realm of the supernatural where the dead may walk and talk again. Reanimation of the dead can also be a result of “weird science,” which prompts a cultural connection to the idea that humankind cannot scientifically tinker with the unknown without facing dire consequence.
As handy a plot device as it is, the idea of reincarnation would also have been abhorrent to the Egyptians. The entire intent of mummification—and the belief system supporting it—was to preserve an individual’s single life to enjoy eternity in the afterlife. Magical “backups”—in case offerings of food ceased or the body was destroyed—were provided by carved and painted representations on tomb walls and in sculptures that could provide a place of safety for the soul.
Despite all the magic (heka) that was commonplace to ancient Egyptians, they never connected curses with mummies. Perhaps the concept resulted from a combination of Western cultural taboos against disturbing the dead and an early Arabic (Egypt became part of the Arab world in 639 CE) belief: if one entered an Egyptian tomb and voiced the proper magical words, its treasure—made otherwise invisible by the magic of the ancients—would then be revealed.
As for eternal love, the Egyptians did expect their loved ones to be with them in the afterlife. They also assumed they would have sex there. Since divorce and remarriage were easy and fairly common, one can suppose “love that never dies” would be an individual choice, if it existed at all.
By the turn of the century the new medium of film took the mummy as a theme. At least three dozen films featuring mummies were made in the silent era. Fiction influenced film; film influenced fiction.
Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 and subsequent exploration and careful conservation of its contents—which took ten years—inspired a new wave of interest in ancient Egypt. The Western world was, once again, enthralled with Egyptomania. Many Egyptian themed novels were churned out during the 1920s and 1930s. Exotic, mysterious ancient Egypt also became a staple of the pulp magazines that flourished in the USA during the 1920s and 1940s, so mummies occasionally showed up there, too. Like all pulp fiction, a few of the tales remain of interest, but most are best forgotten.
Film became the main manufacturer of mummy mythos for the masses. If horrific visions of the vengeful walking dead, pharaonic curses, and murdering mummies invade the public’s nightmares, then the images probably came from the screen—and the Universal films of the 1930s and 1940s and their takeoffs (including the Hammer Films of the 1950s and 1960s) are primary sources.
Although far from the first or last mummy movie, the classic 1932 Universal Pictures movie, The Mummy, directed by Karl Freund and starring Boris Karloff, is the most influential.
The Mummy’s themes of romance, reanimation, and reincarnation are central to the twentieth-century image of the mummy. A doomed dark romance linking the present to the past can easily be seen as a metaphor for cultural fascination with ancient Egypt itself.
Karloff, in Jack P. Pierce’s outstanding make-up, portrays a mummy only briefly—if effectively—early in the film. Although Karloff’s short appearance as a wrapped mummy became an iconic “monster” as a result of the film, he’s not really horrific. The mummy does not intentionally harm anyone; only in human form does the character kill. And, although it doesn’t excuse his crimes, the revived human-appearing mummy is motivated by a profound love for which he has suffered a torturous death and centuries of unfathomable stasis.
The movie was successful enough that Universal exploited it during the 1940s with a series of plodding, unimaginative sequels that had nothing to do with Karloff’s nuanced performance or much with the original mummy. They instead focused on Kharis, a mummy-creature resembling dirty laundry that shambled about with a stiff-legged gait trailing bandages. Kharis is always brought down by humans (and eventually revived). He is a creature serving human evil that “good” humans can defeat.
During the 1950s, stories featuring mummies became scarcer and often light-hearted rather than horrific. Movie mummies re-entered the horror realm in 1959 when Hammer Films managed to hit just about every theme/cliché in their remake of The Mummy.
The literary mummy remained alive in a few short stories and novels. One outstanding novel of the horror/thriller genre remains Cities of the Dead (1988) by Michael Paine, a chilling, well-researched, atmospheric novel written in the voice of Howard Carter. Supposedly excerpted from diaries written by Carter long before his famous discovery, the plot involves mummies, but not the walking dead.
By far the bestselling of all mummy fiction is Anne Rice’s 1989 The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned. Rice returns to the theme of immortal love and lust with a heavy hand that makes this novel more of a steamy romance than a horror story.
Mummies are seldom the theme, they do turn up in some mystery/thriller novels. Elizabeth Peters, a pen name of the late Barbara Mertz (a PhD in Egyptology), invented turn-of-the-century heroine Amelia Peabody, who is based very loosely on Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards, a real Victorian Egyptologist. Most of the nineteen novels only deal tangentially with mummies. Lynda S. Robinson (who holds a doctoral degree in anthropology with a specialty in archaeology) set a series of mysteries in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt. In the first of the series, Murder in the Place of Anubis (1994) her “detective,” Lord Meren, investigates a murder committed in a mummification workshop.
The Egyptologist (2004) by Arthur Phillips, an unusual novel from the literary mainstream, involves a murder-suicide related to mummies, but no revived mummies.
There are numerous books for children and young adults—both fiction and non-fiction—with a mummy theme.
The movie mummy genre was somewhat revived with Universal’s 1999 “reimagining” of their mummy with The Mummy, a big-screen blockbuster. It was followed by The Mummy Returns (2001), and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008)—the last set in China where the mummy of an emperor cursed by a witch centuries before is unearthed—all directed by Stephen Sommers.
Universal Studios announced a reboot of the series in 2012. At the time of this writing, the most announced release date is 9 June 2017. According to a synopsis by Universal, the eponymous mummy of the film—directed Alex Kurtzman, written by Jon Spaihts, and starring Tom Cruise—is an ancient queen (Sofia Boutella) who is awakened in the present day and brings “with her malevolence grown over millennia and terrors that defy human comprehension.”
The history of short fiction anthologies (in English, at least) focusing on fiction related to mummies is a short one. In fact, there had never been a trade anthology of all-new, original stories from multiple authors on the theme until 2013 when The Book of the Dead, edited by Jared Shurin (Jurassic London), was published in collaboration with the Egypt Explorations Society. The Book of the Dead presented twenty new tales of the mummy. This volume owes a great deal to Jurassic London: four of our stories are reprinted from The Book of the Dead; they also published the stand-alone novella republished here: The Good Shabti.
[Even in the realm of extremely limited editions, the only attempt at collecting original mummy stories was Spirits Unwrapped, edited and published by Daniel Braum, in 2005. Really a softcover chapbook (with no ISBN) of thirty-two pages limited to 250 copies, it included four original stories.]
Otherwise we have had—
The Mummy Walks Among Us, edited by Vic Ghidalia (1971, Xerox Education Publications), a compilation of pulp reprints, was—as far as I have discovered—probably the first mummy-themed anthology in the USA. A scant 151 pages, it contained five short stories that first appeared in issues of Weird Tales from 1930 to 1946; Théophile Gautier’s The Mummy’s Foot, first published in French in 1840 (as Le pied de momie) and in English in 1871; and a story by August Derleth that first appeared in Strange Stories, April 1939. It was probably intended for
what we now consider the young adult market.
Mummy! A Chrestomathy of Cryptology, edited by Bill Pronzini (Arbor House, 1980), appears to be the first hardcover mummy anthology. Nominated for a 1981 World Fantasy Award as Best Anthology/Collection, Mummy! contains seven reprinted short stories and five originals. The new stories were all based in non-Egyptian cultures, so I will note them individually: Talmage Powell discovers Mayan mummies in “Charlie,” and mummies are found in Scotland in “The Weekend Magus” by Edward D. Hoch. “The Princess” by Joe R. Lansdale centers on a Danish bog mummy. Ardath Mayhar’s “The Eagle-Claw Rattle” concerns an American Indian mummy. Mysterious (possible) mummies are chanced upon in a New England town in “The Other Room” by Charles L. Grant. The science fictional “Revelation in Seven Stages” by Barry N. Malzberg presents future aliens using Egyptian mummies on Earth long after humanity has ceased to exist.
The tales in The Mummy: Stories of the Living Corpse, edited by Peter Haining (Severn House, 1988), were all reprints published previous to 1940 except for two from the eighties. Mummy Stories, edited by Martin H. Greenberg (Ballantine, 1990) included five original stories—none memorable and two of which don’t actually involve a mummy at all—as well as nine reprints.
Into the Mummy’s Tomb edited by John Richard Stephens (Berkley Books, 2001) was another rehash of dated reprints, novel excerpts, and also included some nonfiction. It reprinted “Lost in a Pyramid, or The Mummy’s Curse” by Louisa May Alcott—more notable for its famous author than literary value—for the fist time since 1869.
Although mummies were not its theme, I’ll also note Pharaoh Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Brittiany A. Koren (DAW, 2002) since two of its thirteen original stories were mummy-related. The same with The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits (2002) edited by Mike Ashley. Its theme is apparent from the title, but since five of its eighteen original Egyptological mysteries include mummies, as does the single reprint—“The Locked Tomb Mystery” by Elizabeth Peters, which first appeared in the 1989 anthology Sisters in Crime—it, too, deserves a mention.