The Whispering Mummy and Others by Sax Rohmer
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The Classics of Gothic Horror Series
Edited by S. T. Joshi
Cover art by Aeron Alfrey
Cover design by Dan Sauer
Trade paperback - 6x9 inches - 295 pages
The work of British writer Sax Rohmer (pseudonym of Arthur Sarsfield Ward, 1883–1959) was once immensely popular, but most of it has lapsed into oblivion—except his corpus of weird fiction. This volume features the best of his tales of horror and strangeness, culled from his numerous story collections from the 1910s and 1920s.
The mystery of Egypt dominated Rohmer’s imagination, and the volume Tales of Secret Egypt (1918) contains some of his best weird work, such as “The Whispering Mummy,” “The Death-Ring of Sneferu,” and “Lord of the Jackals,” which may or may not involve the supernatural.
“Tchériapin,” Rohmer’s finest weird tale, is authentically supernatural and even features a science-fictional undercurrent in its suggestion that a chemical formula can render any organic substance hard as diamonds. “The Curse of a Thousand Kisses” fuses horror and poignancy in its suggestion that a hideous old woman is the centuries-old Scheherazade, the victim of a curse.
Sax Rohmer can take his place with H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and other writers who, while chiefly focusing on tales of adventure, was frequently inclined to incorporate terror and weirdness into his exciting narratives. His stories are as readable today as when they were first written.
Table of Contents
Introduction, by S. T. Joshi
The Death-Ring of Sneferu
Breath of Allah
The Whispering Mummy
Lord of the Jackals
Harûn Pasha
In the Valley of the Sorceress
The Haunting of Low Fennel
The Valley of the Just
The Master of Hollow Grange
The Curse of a Thousand Kisses
The Man with the Shaven Skull
The White Hat
Tchériapin
The Hand of the Mandarin Quong
The Key of the Temple of Heaven
The Classics of Gothic Horror series seeks to reprint novels and stories from the leading writers of weird fiction over the past two centuries or more. Ever since the Gothic novels of the late 18th century, supernatural horror has been a slender but provocative contribution to Western literature. Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, the Victorian ghost story writers, the “titans” of the early twentieth century (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft), the Weird Tales writers, and many others contributed to the development and enrichment of weird fiction as a literary genre, and their work deserves to be enshrined in comprehensive, textually accurate editions. S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction, has done exactly that in establishing this series. Using scholarly resources honed over decades of wide-ranging research, he has assembled volumes featuring not only the complete weird writings of the authors in question, but exhaustive bio-critical introductions and bibliographical data.