Ancient Egyptian Supernatural Tales

Thirteen classic short stories and two novel excerpts offer readers a well-rounded selection of variations on the theme of ancient Egypt as it has been deployed in U.S. and U.K. weird fiction for over 150 years. (Readers expecting supernatural tales from Egypt itself will be disappointed.) Some entries feature ideas that have since become clichés of the canon, including the reanimated mummy used as a weapon in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Lot No. 249” and the curse associated with the violation of a mummy’s tomb in Louisa May Alcott’s “Lost in a Pyramid.” In others, Egypt and its artifacts are touchstones for generic weird tales, among them Tennessee Williams’s conte cruel “The Vengeance of Nitocris” and Edgar Allan Poe’s social satire “Some Words with a Mummy.” In the book’s best story, Algernon Blackwood’s “A Descent of Egypt,” horror stems from the all-absorbing atmosphere of antiquity that makes Egypt seem “a living entity of enormous power.” Lewis’s introductory remarks about the thematic elements that define these Egypt-themed tales will strike some readers as overly analytic, but he provides his audience with a satisfying mix of well known and less familiar works. (July)