The Book of the Dead

First published 2013 by Jurassic London
SW8 1XN, Great Britain
www.jurassic-london.com

978-0-9571696-4-7 (Limited Edition)
978-09576462-5-4 (Paperback)
978-0-9576462-6-1 (eBook)

Introduction © copyright John J. Johnston
“Cerulean Memories” copyright © Maurice Broaddus 2013
“The Dedication of Sweetheart Abbey” copyright © David Bryher 2013
“Escape from the Mummy’s Tomb” copyright © Jesse Bullington 2013
“The Curious Case of the Werewolf that Wasn’t, the Mummy that Was and the Cat in the Jar” copyright © Gail Carriger 2013
“Ramesses on the Frontier” copyright © Paul Cornell 2013
“Egyptian death and the afterlife: mummies (Rooms 62-3)” copyright © Jonathan Green 2013
“Akhenaten Goes to Paris” copyright © Louis Greenberg 2013
“Bit-U-Men” copyright © Maria Dahvana Headley 2013
“The Cats of Beni Hasan” copyright © Jenni Hill 2013
“Three Memories of Death” copyright © Will Hill 2013
“The Thing of Wrath” copyright © Roger Luckhurst 2013
“Henry” copyright © Glen Mehn 2013
“Old Souls” copyright © David Thomas Moore 2013
“Her Heartbeat, An Echo” copyright © Lou Morgan 2013
“Cerulean Memories” copyright © Sarah Newton 2013
“All is Dust” copyright © Den Patrick 2013
“Tollund” copyright © Adam Roberts 2013
“Mysterium Tremendum” copyright © Molly Tanzer 2013
“Inner Goddess” copyright © Michael West 2013

Illustrations by Garen Ewing
www.garenewing.co.uk

eBook conversion by handebooks.co.uk
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The right of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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For Amelia Blandford Edwards

I first met Jared Shurin, the genial Editor of this impressive volume in April 2012, at the launch of an earlier Jurassic anthology,
Stories of the Smoke
, taking place in the crowded basement of the “Betsey Trotwood,” in Clerkenwell.

I was immediately impressed by his considerable enthusiasm, not only for the collection of Dickens-inspired stories, being launched that evening, but also, for his numerous publications, at that point, still in their planning stages. Within a very few minutes, Jared had outlined his ideas for an anthology of short stories centred upon that most elusive and frequently disregarded of literary revenants: the mummy, and such was his passion and the scope of his vision that it took him very little time to convince me, as a ‘real-life’ and
reasonably
tame Egyptologist, to write the introduction to this volume and to encourage me to speak with my colleagues at the Egypt Exploration Society about the possibility of a collaboration in order to make his proposed “The Book of the Dead” – the name, as I recall, was already in place at the point – as effective as possible and to reach the widest possible readership.

I readily agreed because, although the EES was founded in 1882 with the purpose of protecting and raising public awareness of the monuments of ancient and medieval Egypt, primarily through excavation and publication and is, as such, a serious and academically-based learned society, its founder, Amelia Blandford Edwards, was a remarkable woman who, as a novelist and writer of short-stories, was responsible for a number of highly popular tales of terror, involving supernatural encounters of varying kinds and replete with gas-lit menace. So, the idea of a collaboration between the EES and the publisher of short tales of the uncanny, or, in modern parlance, “speculative fiction” struck me as a peculiarly serendipitous enterprise.

Sadly, the redoubtable Amelia never penned a mummy story during her prolific career. However, it is evident from her 1891 article, written for
The Arena
magazine in Boston and entitled “My Home Life,” that she certainly had inclinations in that direction. In the description of her antiquity-filled house in Westbury-on-Trym, she wrote:

“Rings, necklaces, bracelets and earrings, amulets, mirrors, and toilet objects, once the delight of dusky beauties long since embalmed and forgotten: funerary statuettes, scarabs, rolls of mummy cloth, and the like are laid by “in a sacred gloom” from which they are rarely, if ever, brought forth into the light of day. And there are stranger things than these – fragments of spiced and bituminised humanity to be shown to visitors who are not nervous, nor given to midnight terrors. Here is a baby’s foot (some mother cried over it once) in the Japanese cabinet in the ante-room. There are three mummified hands behind
Allibone’s Dictionary of English Authors
, in the library. There are two arms with hands complete – the one almost black, the other singularly fair – in a drawer in my dressing room; and grimmest of all, I have the heads of two ancient Egyptians in a wardrobe in my bedroom, who, perhaps, talk to each other in the watches of the night, when I am sound asleep.”

There was also another reason for my interest in involving the EES in this project, which I’ve kept from Jared until now: from my researches into the reception of ancient Egypt in popular culture I knew that, whilst there had been a number of anthologies of mummy fiction from 1971 to 2001, and many more since the advent of the e-book, these had all been reprints of older stories, collected and repackaged for a modern readership. Jared’s proposed publication would be the first ever anthology of specifically commissioned tales of this important literary sub-genre. So, once again, the idea of a collaboration between Jurassic and the EES, an organisation well acquainted with “firsts” in the field of Egyptian archaeology, seemed obvious.

As mentioned above, although I’m an Egyptologist who works in the field of mortuary archaeology – tombs, mummies, burial beliefs and practices – I also spend a great deal of my time writing and lecturing about those aspects of ancient Egypt, which for a wide variety of reasons have been absorbed into popular culture, from the 18th century to the present day. Although it’s a relatively new branch of the discipline, I think it’s important to understand what writers, artists, architects, filmmakers, and, of course, the public make of our academic researches; of how the wider perceptions of that vanished civilisation impact upon our daily lives, from the buildings that surround us, to the advertising that bombards us, to the blockbuster films that we choose to watch at the cinema or in the comfort of our homes. The myriad conceptions of Egypt’s ancient culture in the Western world are endlessly fascinating and, over the last hundred or so years, in particular, have been increasingly based, not just on the exotic splendour of ancient monuments but upon the ancients’ supposed fascination with death, which, of course, coincided with the Victorian predilection for the Gothic. This has manifested itself in everything from cemetery architecture to public mummy unrollings before vast audiences, throughout Europe and the United States.

But is its, perhaps, in the popular arts that Egypt has taken the greatest hold of the modern mind – literature, film, comic-books and television. During the last 180 or so years, all have been replete, at some point, with images of the ancient Egyptian walking dead.

The Egyptian concept of the afterlife required, amongst numerous other magical elements, the preservation of the body, so considerable time and effort was expended on the embalming process. When one stands before a mummy in its museum case, it is humbling to think of the dedication and veneration lavished upon the deceased by the priesthood in that final preparation for the tomb: the shaving and washing of the body, the removal of the brain and the internal organs, as the chief sites of decay and corruption, the desiccation by natron salt and subsequent cleansing with palm wine and anointing with sumptuous oils and resins, before beginning the lengthy process of wrapping each part of the body in lengths of fine linen, beginning with individual digits and ending in huge winding sheets; the creation of a perfect package, ready for the tomb and designed for eternity, the whole process accompanied throughout by the recitation of spells and liturgies, the fanning of incense, and the enactment of rituals, never committed to papyrus and, therefore, long-since lost to us.

At certain points in Egypt’s long history, the perfection of the embalmers’ art is such that one might almost expect the eyes of those unwrapped mummies, dead for more than two thousand years to flicker open, as if roused from sleep, to scan this modern world with ancient eyes and feel… precisely what? Fear? Wonder? Indignation? Annoyance? Fury?

It is scarcely surprising, then, after Napoleon and his team of savants reopened Egypt to the gaze of the West, that these inscrutable remnants of humanity with their arcane backgrounds, should inspire writers to seek to reanimate them through their sensationalist fictions.

It has been commented by various writers and academics that the figure of the revived and ambulant Egyptian mummy has no urtext in the way that vampires and zombies have, respectively, Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
(1897) and Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
(1818). However, I think the reality is rather more complex: whilst mummy fiction, as a sub-genre of literary fantasy can be said to begin in 1827 with Jane Webb’s three-volume
The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-second Century
, there are, in fact three later works, which vie for the title of the seminal work of mummy fiction: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s
Ring of Thoth
(1890), his more overtly horrific
Lot No. 249
(1898) and Bram Stoker’s
The Jewel of Seven Stars
(1903). They each present different aspects of Egypt’s walking dead, whether as the mournful and immortal lover, the desiccated revengeful juggernaut or the malevolently powerful sorcerer.

Although it is primarily Doyle’s bandaged monstrosity from
Lot No.249
, which informs the modern conception of the mummy, the events surrounding the discovery of Tutankhamun’s, largely intact, tomb in 1922 and the subsequent death of the expedition’s sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, have contributed substantially to the modern idea of lurking evil reaching out from the tombs of Egypt’s ancient dead, not least because one of the journalists covering the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb was John L Balderston, who would go on to script the Universal’s feature film
The Mummy
, (US, Karl Freund, 1932) starring Boris Karloff as Imhotep. Cinema quickly embraced this new and exotic horror and the mummy has continued to prowl on the periphery of popular cinematic culture in every decade of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, although, the figure of the revived Egyptian corpse rapidly became, with one or two notable exceptions, something of a cinematic cypher, leaving mummy literature and to languish, somewhat forlornly, from the 1940s in the rather gaudy and exploitative worlds of pulp magazines, which have themselves largely disappeared from the literary scene.

As such, I’m both delighted and astonished by the variety and invention displayed in the nineteen tales, which make up the Jurassic “Book of the Dead”. The efforts taken by their authors to honour many of the traditional tropes of mummy fiction, whilst expanding into new and previously unexplored territory have, if you will, resurrected a form, which has for too long, been gathering dust.

Included here are tales set in both the distant past and the far future, using aspects of the legend of the living mummy and the enigmatic gods of Egypt to fashion something quite distinctive and, frequently, as in David Bryher’s submission, deeply unsettling. Engagement with the modern world and its mores, both technological and cultural, is disturbingly evoked by Glen Mehn, Maurice Broaddus, and Den Patrick, all of whom prove that the old ways are not easily forgotten. Whilst, on the other hand, Roger Luckhurst’s skilful melding of reality and fantasy revisits the Victorian literary origins of mummy fiction with a tale of terror delivered by flickering firelight, over brandy and cigars.

I’m personally pleased to see that the ancient kings of Egypt are well represented. Paul Cornell takes as his inspiration, the somewhat unexpected, identification, in 1999, of the mummy of Ramesses I in the Michael C Carlos Museum, Atlanta, whilst Louis Greenberg sends Akhenaten’s mummy to Paris on a charming visit of reconciliation, and the royal embalming tents of Egypt’s XIXth Dynasty provide the setting for Will Hill’s poignant tale.

Unsurprisingly, felines slink into a number of the contributions in all their various forms: as mummies, as deities, and as the more usual but no less startling variety, in submissions by Michael West, Molly Tanzer and Jenni Hill.

Other authors transplant their mummies from the Nile Valley to the Russian Steppes and the “Candy Capitol of the World,” to unnerving effect, while Adam Roberts and Gail Carriger create alterative histories of both Egypt and the wider world, in tales, which are, respectively, terrifyingly innovative and whimsically unexpected.

The romance and, indeed, eroticism of Egypt and its mummies, features much favoured by 19th century writers from Théophile Gautier to H Rider Haggard are evident in the collection, with fantastical tales of love: lost, immortal, recurring, and obsessive sitting alongside Jesse Bullington’s tale of new love, inspired by the mummy’s shambling plight.

I’m sorry that I have neither the time nor, indeed, the space – I’m aware that this is already a mammoth tome – to be able to write about each of the contributions at greater length but, then, not only is brevity the soul of wit but I really wouldn’t want to spoil any of the authors’ finely wrought surprises, awaiting you herein.

Speaking of which, it came as no surprise whatsoever that Jared had, once again, secured the services of a top-notch artist to illustrate this latest volume of speculative fiction. The surprise, though, came in the sheer beauty and detailed simplicity of Garen Ewing’s magnificent line drawings. Like the vignettes adorning the finest examples of the Egyptian “Book of the Dead,” (in fact, a title coined by Karl Richard Lepsius in 1842, for the compendium of spells, intended to accompany the deceased into the tomb in order to serve as both a guide and safeguard in the journey through the afterlife) these art works do more than merely illustrate the text, they bring elegance and vibrancy to an already richly diverse collection of tales.

It seems appropriate, at this juncture, to deliver a warning as you prepare to enter
The Book of the Dead
. Egyptology in fiction has always been a somewhat strange beast, often on little more than nodding terms with the discipline in the real world. Jared and I have, therefore, taken the view that the worlds created herein have their own internal logic and vitality, which we should not impede with the imposition of stringent Egyptological facts. It would have been unfair on the authors and would have ruined the spirit of the publication: mummy fiction, whether literary or cinematic, has a long and dishonourable tradition of getting certain of its facts wrong; it’s part of the fun and facts should never be allowed to interfere with the telling of a good tale… and be in no doubt, these are very good tales.

Be prepared, therefore, to shudder, smile, shed a tear, and even lose some sleep, for together, each of the contributors to this particular “Book of the Dead,” have accomplished that most incredible of achievements, they have enabled the mummy to live again.

John J Johnston

West Dulwich

September 2013