Peter Haining – The Mummy: Stories of the Living Corpse

[dem bones]

Peter Haining – The Mummy: Stories of the Living Corpse (Severn House, 1988)

Trevor Newman

Introduction – Peter Haining

Edgar Allan Poe – Some Words With A Mummy
Grant Allen – My New Year’s Eve Among the Mummies
Arthur Conan Doyle – Lot No. 249
E. & H. Heron – The Story Of Baelbrow
Guy Boothby – A Professor Of Egyptology
Sax Rohmer – The Mysterious Mummy
Théophile Gautier – The Mummy’s Foot
Jeffery Farnol – Black Coffee
Houdini & H. P. Lovecraft – Imprisoned With The Pharoahs
Elliott O’Donnell – The Mummy Worshippers
A. Hyatt Verrill – The Flying Head
E. F. Benson – Monkeys
Griffin Jay & Henry Sucher – The Mummy’s Ghost
Robert Bloch – The Secret Of Sebek
Dennis Wheatley – A Life For A Life
Ray Bradbury – Colonel Stonesteel’s Genuine Home-Made Truly Egyptian Mummy

Blurb:
Anyone who's ever seen a mummy in a museum will know the morbid fascination of this most awesome and bizarre figure of fear. lt has captured the public imagination to become one of the most popular
enduring monsters in fantasy and horror fiction, and the cinema too has captivated and terrified audiences with performances from actors like Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee as dead men come alive.
In this sixth title in Severn House‘s series of horror anthologies are featured some of the very best short stories on the mummy by such masters of the genre as:
Edgar Allan Poe
Sax Rohmer
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
H P Lovecraft
Dennis Wheatley
Robert Bloch
Ray Bradbury
and — perhaps most surprising of all — escapologist Houdini, whose remarkable story is also included in this collection.
In raiding the archives of macabre fiction, editor Peter Haining has unearthed a number of rare and long-neglected tales, ranging widely from ancient Egypt to modern London, and described their background in an introduction encompassing the mummy's place in literature and the cinema — and. indeed, in history.

A decent enough selection, if over-reliant on big names and genre classics. Bill Pronzini had not long included the Benson, Conan-Doyle, and Poe stories in Mummy! A Chrestomathy of Crypt-ology (Arbor House, 1980), and Martin H. Greenberg would do so again in Mummy Stories (Ballatine, 1990). The Wheatley, Gautier, E & H. Heron and Houdini-HPL "collaboration" have likewise been around the block. Where is Haining favourite Seabury Quinn when we most need him?

But all is not lost!

Elliott O'Donnell - The Mummy Worshippers: (Strange Cults & Secret Societies of Modern London, Philip Allan, 1934). As told to the author by Colonel Bobdillo, "a shrivelled, sallow faced, white-haired man who spoke with a foreign accent and looked very much like a mummy himself."

Appropriately, they first meet in the Oriental Department of the British Museum. The mummified Katebit has just inclined her head toward O'Donnell, but the stranger assure's him that's nothing special, she does it all the time. They relocate to a teashop in Tottenham Count Road where, between trying to pull the pretty conductor of the house band, the Colonel confides that he once spent an evening in the company of a twelve strong Peruvian-mummy cult at a house in Upper Norwood ...

The occasion is a ceremony to introduce the mummified Princess Tetraqua to the Chulpa, or sacred tomb, they'd constructed for her in the back garden. This accomplished, they keep vigil for, what seems to the Colonel, bored out of his skin, an age. How come they all look so expectant? And then it happens. A shapely female form glides forth from the Chulpa and approaches the assembled. Guess who among the assembled she favours with a kiss?

Even O'Donnell is a little sceptical, but Bobdillo is no doubt the phantom with the satin lips was that of Princess Tetraqua. The next evening she even performed an encore in his bedroom ("To be kissed to death by those lips would, indeed, be a blissful ending"). O'Donnell notes that there's every chance of the randy old dog pulling the blonde band-leader, too, the way she just smiled back at him.

"Some critics have suggested that the dividing line between O'Donnell's 'eye-witness' accounts and his tales of fantasy is very narrow, but I am inclined to believe his story was founded on reality," deadpans the editor during his introduction.

[Swampirella]

Thanks for details on an Elliott O'Donnell story I hadn't read. You gotta love the man and his imagination....

[dem bones]

Oct 27, 2018 14:10:20 GMT Swampirella said:

You gotta love the man and his imagination....

I do, I do! The Mummy Worshippers is very charming, quite possibly telling, too. "The Colonel, pausing again, looked so sentimental that I nearly laughed outright, preventing myself only by a mighty effort," suggests O'Donnell was not quite the easy mark he's often painted.

You can tell from the chapter headings that Strange Cults & Secret Societies of Modern London is a winner. The Cult of the Horrible, The Rosicrucians and Thugs, The Cult of Cruelty, Tree Cults, Leopard and Panther People, Get Rid of the Old Cult and The Suicide Society, The Gorgons and Mummy Worshippers ....

[Swampirella]

I just looked at archive.org for it; no luck but did get "Rooms of Mystery", which is a bit rare...

[dem bones]

Griffin Jay & Henry Sucher – The Mummy’s Ghost: According to the editor, The Mummy's Ghost is a "special adaptation" of the original screenplay, plausible enough, as it reads like a quick-fire synopsis. The scant acknowledgements credit 'B. P. Singer Ltd,' (Michel Parry described them as "a syndication agency supplying 'fillers' to newspapers and magazines"), whose president was none other than Kurt Singer. Even so, it is not unlikely the adaptation is Haining's own.

Kharis the four- thousand-year-old mummy, happily recovered from injuries sustained at close of The Mummy's Tomb (he was incinerated to a crisp), returns to Mapleton to strangle a substantial number of local residents in pursuit of his lover, Princess Ananka, current whereabouts: the Egyptian room at the Scripps Museum. Kharis is doomed to eternal disappointment. No sooner can he clasp Ananka in his arms than she disintegrates to dust. "The fate of those who defy the will of the ancient gods shall be a cruel and violent death," and there is nothing left but for Kharis to abduct his soul mate's current incarnation, Amina Minsona, High School student, to share his swampy doom.

Incidentally, the secret to Kharis's longevity is the tana leaf. He must drink a potion derived from eight of these every full moon. Nine, and he is transformed into a homicidal killer. Trust poor Professor Norman to mistranslate the hieroglyphic ...

[dem bones]

A. Hyatt Verrill - The Flying Head: (Strange Stories, June 1939). "Resting between the drawn-up knees of the mummy, and clasped in the shrunken hands, was a human head." Dr. Stokes discovers - at cost of his life - why the native labourers were atypically reluctant to excavate a particular tomb in the Peruvian desert.

It's a belter, this one. The mummified skull is not just any old head, but one connected to a tiny, pathetic, shrivelled body which, in life, would never have supported it. Benign in daylight, the ghastly green-eyed monstrosity spouts wings after nightfall, seeking out tomb-defilers to sink its needle teeth into. Stokes initially blames the trashing of his laboratory on a rogue fruit bat with a grudge.

[andydecker]

I only read his The Plague of the Living Dead (1927) which doesn't make a lot of sense but has as lot of crazy ideas.

[ripper]

I have read a few of O'Donnell's books and to say I am sceptical of them being anywhere near being true is an understatement, but I have to say that he writes some rattlingly good and entertaining yarns, so I really don't care that much if O'Donnell has made them all up or not.

I remember enjoying Rohmer's tale quite a bit. It is one of his Claw occult detective stories if I remember correctly, and I was a little disappointed that I could only find that one to read.

[ripper]

My error. I was mistaking Rohmer's The Mysterious Mummy for the same author's The Headless Mummies, an adventure for Morris Klaw, Rohmer's occult detective.

[helrunar]

Rohmer's Dream Detective Moris Klaw tales are a lot of fun if you can overlook the inevitable racist remarks here and there. I think the book may now be available in an electronic edition.

"The Mysterious Mummy" used to be a pretty obscure Rohmer tale. If I recall correctly, it's early, from around 1913, and not all that good.

I just visited the library and was able to photocopy Rohmer's personal favorite short story, "The Fires of Baal," from a bound volume of Collier's 1929 issues. Perhaps I will write something about it on one of the Rohmer threads.

H.

[ripper]

Nov 19, 2018 21:17:11 GMT helrunar said:

Rohmer's Dream Detective Moris Klaw tales are a lot of fun if you can overlook the inevitable racist remarks here and there. I think the book may now be available in an electronic edition.

"The Mysterious Mummy" used to be a pretty obscure Rohmer tale. If I recall correctly, it's early, from around 1913, and not all that good.

I just visited the library and was able to photocopy Rohmer's personal favorite short story, "The Fires of Baal," from a bound volume of Collier's 1929 issues. Perhaps I will write something about it on one of the Rohmer threads.

H.

I searched around for copies of The Dream Detective after enjoying The Headless Mummies so much but with no luck, so I will keep a lookout for an ebook edition.

[helrunar]

I see copies of various paperback editions being sold through online vendors in the US $3--$6 range. I can't find an electronic edition in a quick search. If I do see one, I will post a link.

Best wishes,

Helrunar

[dem bones]

Nov 19, 2018 21:17:11 GMT helrunar said:

"The Mysterious Mummy" used to be a pretty obscure Rohmer tale. If I recall correctly, it's early, from around 1913, and not all that good.

Sax Rohmer – The Mysterious Mummy: (Pearson’s Weekly Christmas Extra, 26 Nov. 1903). Scandal at the Great Portland Street Museum when the priceless Rieza vase is pilfered from the Etruscan room. Suspicion initially falls on a wandering mummy - or might the shifty visitor in the high hat and seedy frock coat have something to do with it? Yet another instance of "neglected"/ forgotten supernatural fiction that got that way for a reason.

Guy Boothby - A Professor of Egyptology: (The Graphic, December 10, 1904). Cairo. Unwanted adventure in a sarcophagus for Miss Cecilia Westmoreland. The young English tourist is lured to the Giza museum under the hypnotic spell of sinister Egyptologist Professor Constanides though, much to our disappointment, his motives are honourable. A tale of an innocent girl inadvertently caught between feuding princes, murder, reincarnation, and a lost soul who has waited 4,000 years to right a wrong.

[dem bones]

Grant Allen – My New Year’s Eve Among the Mummies: (Belgravia Christmas Annual, 1878). The narrator, a gent with an eye for the ladies, blunders into a centuries-unopened Great Pyramid of Abu Yilla to carouse with Egyptian nobility on the one night in a millennia they are free to abandon their mummy cases. Our hero, much taken with the flirtatious Princess Hatasou, volunteers to undergo embalming rather than return to a world where he is doomed to marry ghastly-but-rich Miss Editha Fitz-Simkins. Temporarily rationalised as malaria-induced hallucination, though we'll not be certain unless someone revisits the tomb on 31st December 2877.

Theophile Gautier - The Mummy's Foot: (One of Cleopatra's Nights & Other Fantastic Romances, trans. Lafcadio Hearn, 1882). As purchased by the author from a Parisian junk shop for use as a novelty paperweight. On returning from a bar late that evening, Gautier is visited by the despondent spectre of Princess Hermonthis who offers him the tiny green idol she wears at her bosom in return for her missing foot. He accepts and, such is Hermonthis's joy, she whisks him away to the subterranean kingdom of the Pharaohs to meet her father. What an enchanted night it's been!

Next morning, a lousy hangover. Rats, it was all a dream. Or was it?

Jeffery Farnol - Black Coffee: (The Shadow and Other Stories, 1929). Professor Jervis had in his study the mummy of an Egyptian Princess, miraculously preserved. He waits for her eyes to open and reveal her secret.

Bucking the trend, Asasuera, Princess of the House of Ra, is a creepshow ugly mummy with the face of a devil and personality to match. Professor Dick Jervis unwisely agrees to store her at his New York apartment for globe trotting pal, Magnus, but only on condition he screw down the sarcophagus lid: her cruel eyes are just too unnerving.

Jervis has been overdoing it, working night and day to complete a treatise, The Higher Ethics of Philosophy, fighting off sleep with gallons of black coffee until he's wired and twitchy as Hell. Maybe his excessive caffeine intake explains a growing conviction that Asasuera is even now freeing herself from the casket ....

[dem bones]

E. & H. Heron - The Story Of The Baelbrow: (Pearsons, April 1898). "The creature with the bandaged arm!"

Bael Ness, East Anglia. The Swaffam family's three-centuries-old mansion has been haunted down the generations. The present day owners are fond of their spook - until it turns malevolent and kills a maid. Occult detective Flaxman Low confirms that an evil spirit has animated the mummy recently acquired by Swaffam senior, turning it vampiric. His heir, young upstart Harold the smarmy stockbroker, volunteers to spend a night in the supposedly 'haunted' museum to expose Low as no better than a "hysterical woman."

Ray Bradbury - Colonel Stonesteel's Genuine Home-Made Truly Egyptian Mummy: (Omni, May 1981). The old Colonel magic's up an authentic Egyptian mummy to inspire bored twelve-year-old Charlie Flagstaff, teach him imagination is our greatest gift, etc.

Bradbury in sentimental mood, pining for lost childhood in Dullsville, Illinois, as usual.