Andrew Smith - Lost In A Pyramid & Other Classic Mummy

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Andrew Smith (ed.) - Lost In A Pyramid & Other Classic Mummy Stories (British Library, 2016)

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Louisa May Alcott - Lost in a Pyramid, or the Mummy’s Curse
Baron Schlippenback, KSL - A Night With King Pharaoh
Grant Allen - My New Year’s Eve Among the Mummies
Justin Huntly McCarthy - Professor Petrus
Eva M. Henry - The Curse of Vasartas
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Lot No. 249
Julian Hawthorne - The Unseen Man’s Story
Kate & Hesketh Prichard - The Story of Baelbrow
Sax Rohmer - The Mysterious Mummy
Hester White - The Dead Hand
Guy Boothby - A Professor of Egyptology
W. G. Peasgood - The Necklace of Dreams

Blurb:
`As he rushed madly and wildly through the night, he could hear a swift, dry patter behind him, and could see that this horror was bounding at his heels, with blazing eyes and one stringy arm out-thrown.'
A mummy disappears from its sarcophagus in the dead of night; a crazed Egyptologist entombs a beautiful young woman; a student at Oxford reveals the terrible secrets of an ancient papyrus.
These are among the twelve tales from the golden age of the mummy story collected here - stories that still cast a spell with their different versions of the mummy's curse, some chilling, others darkly romantic and even comic.
Including tales by major writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Louisa May Alcott, as well as rare discoveries unearthed for the first time in over 100 years, this enthralling collection is introduced by Andrew Smith, a leading expert on ghost stories and Victorian gothic.

ANDREW SMITH is Reader in Nineteenth Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield. His 17 published books include The Ghost Story 1840-1920: A Cultural History, Gothic Literature, Victorian Demons and Gothic Radicalism. His latest book is Gothic Death: 1740-1914. He is a past President of the International Gothic Association.

Five stories in common with Peter Haining's The Mummy: Stories of the Living Corpse, the remainder mostly resurrected from popular periodicals.

Eva M. Henry - The Curse Of Vasaratas: (Belgravia, Oct. 1889). Grand Cairo. It's the find of Mr. John Blake's career: a stone sarcophagus containing one perfectly preserved mummy, retrieved from a previously undiscovered tomb. No sooner has Mr. Blake shipped it to the British Museum than he learns of the curse and implores narrator Montague to retrieve it as a matter of life or death! Montague does as he's bid - saving the life of Llora, the Egyptologist's beautiful daughter, in the process - but it's already too late for Blake who is trampled to death by an angry elephant.

Hester White - The Dead Hand: (Gentleman's Magazine, Dec. 1904). While stationed near the Nile, Captain Travers misappropriates a strange curio intended for postage to the rector of Mudton-on-the-Marsh. Unfortunately for Travers, the relic is a mummified hand, cursed to bring ill fortune to those who, briefly, possess it.

Travis is recalled home. From Assouan to London he is tormented by a spectral 'Gippy', suffering a series of mishaps, the most spectacular of which occurs on Charlton Park racecourse where he's crushed beneath his own horse while showing off to Miss Eva Colleton. Clearly indebted to The Monkey's Paw, the light touch and lack of hideous fatalities affords it a possibly unintentional slapstick element.

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Julian Hawthorne - The Unseen Mans Tale: (Six Cent Sam's, 1893): Monsieur Carigliano, famously "eccentric" Egyptologist, gains access to a secret chamber of Queen Amunuhet's tomb, interrupting a banquet of the dead. He is invisible to all save the beautiful Queen, who recognises him as Pantour, her lover from three and a half centuries past. When Amunuhet died, Pantour removed her heart to keep their love alive. In later years, he would bribe an embalmer to cut out his own, burn it, and replace it with that of his beloved. The bad news for Carigliano/ Pantour is that, if Amunuhet is to enter the kingdom of Osiris, she must have it back. Painfully slow build up - as with Lovecraft's Imprisoned with the Pharaohs, story opens with a travelogue - picks up when narrator finally learns the identity of a strange fellow pottering about the archaeological dig.

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Justin Huntly McCarthy - Professor Petrus: (Belgravia, Oct. 1884). "You know that I have a peculiar method of enjoying myself in cities that are new and strange to me ... I am fond of following some one of the passers-by - the first person I happen to come across, it matters not whom, a working man perhaps, or even a pretty woman - just to see where my brief connection with some portion of their lives may lead me ..."

Confession of celebrated traveller and darling of London Society, Amber Pasha. As a young man Pasha took to stalking an eminent Egyptologist (and notorious curmudgeon), across the capital, even renting rooms overlooking the garden of the seemingly derelict property Petrus would visit for purpose unknown. Eventually Pasha broke in to discover a room festooned with artefacts ... and a beautiful woman. Somehow the Professor has revived an ancient Egyptian Queen of very amorous persuasion. The young man allows his natural instincts to get the better of him. Petrus, realising someone has molested his reanimated mummy, tetchily embalms her a second time, hexing the cur responsible for ruining whatever occult quantum leap he was working toward.

Join personal pick of the more obscure items to date along with Curse of the Vasartas.