The Jewel Of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker

Ok, so what if I'm always willing to give an Irishman another chance? So Dracula didn't do it for me when I finally got around to reading it; no matter. The old boy's such a big name in Victorian horror, and has been so influential, that there was bound to be something he'd written that I'd like. And after a chance viewing of the original 1932 The Mummy, I was on something of a Mummy binge. I watched the Hammer Mummies, I re-read refutations of Tutankhamun's curse, and I gobbled up every Victorian era piece of Egyptian horror hokum I could- and that didn't take long, because there aren't that many.
Besides Conan Doyle's formative takes on the genre, and a few others (including The Beetle, and that crazy story where the mummy comes back to life in the far future), there was only one other serious piece of 'classic' mummy fiction that I had yet to tackle- and that was The Jewel of Seven Stars by old Abraham Stoker. And so we were to spend several more nights together, sifting through lumpy prose, spelunking for plot points and keeping a watchful eye in case any action showed up.

The action (or inaction as it'd be more accurately described), gets underway when a young lawyer called Malcolm Ross gets called to the house of one Margaret Trelawny. What's that you say? Not the daughter of the famous Egyptologist, Abel Trelawny? Why, the very same (Yeah, this is one of those universes where Egyptologists are household names)! Ah, but Stoker's playing it cool, and this plot-relevant tid-bit is kept from us for some little time. It's all part of his plan to make us think that Jewel is not a mystical horror story, but in fact one of those boring Victorian locked room whodunnits (look, I really don't care whodunnit, unless it was a mummy, in which case, GET TO THE MUMMY). Instead, we get to spend lots of time with several police officers who potter around in Trelawny's house, mostly not even leaving his room. They learn that old man Trelawny's been somehow put into a coma. Eventually, something that would have been immediately obvious to the characters is revealed to the reader: that Trelawny's room is absolutely crammed with Egyptian artifacts, including several mummified cats and even people.

At this, Malcolm and the policemen and doctors who are now on the case wonder if the artifacts could possibly be disseminating some kind of poisonous odour that the old man has picked up, so they start wearing face-masks when they're in the room. Strange things begin happening in the house at night, and suspicion quickly falls on young Margaret. This bothers Malcolm, because though he can see that she's the most likely culprit, she still makes his head go giddy and his stomach turn to mush. Well, that's something I can get behind, you know. I mean, we all know how much love sucks. But Malcolm is such a typical late-Victorian chaste goody-two-shoes romantic hero that he makes me a little bit sick myself. He puts Margaret up on a ridiculous pedestal constantly, making the love subplot contrived and unbelievable. His anguish and mood swings are the only things about him that strike a note of truth for a young man in love, but when it comes to Margaret herself, he never thinks anything that a real person would in such a situation. Did Victorian gentlemen really have to restrain even their thoughts like this? This part of the book goes on for way too long.

Anyway, after some time Abel Trelawny wakes up, and things start to look up for the reader. When one of his Egyptologist colleagues shows up at the house, Abel is forced to tell the gang some of the backstory behind the mysterious goings-on. It turns out that Abel and his man have something of a history of mucking about in cursed tombs- in particular, the tomb of one Queen Tera. Finally the story escapes the confines of Abel's bedroom (in the form of a flashback), and there's a few very effective chapters describing the history of this rogue queen, as well as the Englishmen's violation of her tomb.

Here Stoker manages to conjure up the mystic side of Egyptology, which really is what we all came for really, right? Tera's perfectly-preserved hand (notably white, mind you) gets removed, and starts turning up in some really weird places. My favourite part of the book is when they are lugging Tera's coffin through the desert after plundering her tomb, only to find their missing Arab servant lying dead with the missing mummy hand on top of him. If anyone is ticking boxes, yeah the Englishmen are accompanied by a bunch of untrustworthy, superstitious Arabs who come to nasty ends at the hands of the curse while their white masters, who instigated the tomb robbery, make it out alive. I guess the writers of the Hammer movies must have really loved that bit.

Tera's character herself is drawn pretty sketchily, and though she does control all the events of the plot, we never really feel like we know her. From what we do learn though, there's definite echoes of Ayesha from She going on- a powerful woman from an ancient civilization who uses sorcery to gain immortality. Tera plans to bring herself into the nascent 20th century in the 'northern land' she has always dreamed of: England. The particulars of her plan are very intricate, and Stoker has constructed a set-up of spells, amulets, and centuries-long plotting that Dan Brown would be proud of (err... might not seem like it, but that's a compliment). Another of my favourite bits is when the protagonists realise that the titular jewel of seven stars matches the stars of the plough, even though thousands of years ago, when Tera constructed it, they would not have been in the same position. It's a nice touch that brings home the vastness of the time involved and the perfection of her plan. There's plenty of other interesting Egyptological information, and it shows that Stoker really knew his stuff.

Meanwhile, the crew has relocated to Cornwall so that Trelawny can... help to raise the obviously evil (or at best extremely powerful, troublesome and unpredictable) Tera. He comes over all Doctor Frankenstein here, pondering on what modern people could learn from messing with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. It's hinted that the Egyptians may have been far more advanced than us in many fields, including possibly having knowledge of radioactive materials (here Stoker again includes some ripped-from-the-headlines stuff). They begin to wonder what a successful resurrection of Tera would mean for their religious beliefs, which is a step further than most Victorian fiction usually goes! A good old-fashioned storm brews as they assemble the necessary equipment around her sarcophagus in a cave beneath their Cornwall house. Meanwhile, Malcolm is wondering why Margaret (who was conceived the moment her father had a mysterious 'missing time' episode in Tera's tomb, and who is the spitting image of the ancient queen) hasn't quite been acting herself lately...

It should be obvious that there is a lot of good stuff in The Jewel of Seven Stars. Stoker was something of a minor expert in Egyptology, and the book is better-researched than most of its ilk. There's definitely more going on here than just using Egypt as a handy place to pull spooky stories from; there's the fear that this time (unlike in Dracula), even science and modern technology might not be enough to save us from ancient evils. And like She, that evil will take the form of what a turn-of-the-century man would fear the most: a powerful, liberated woman.

But these interesting themes are marred by a pace that's slower than intercontinental drift, turning the non-Egyptological sections into quite a slog. And it would have helped if Malcolm wasn't such a wet blanket either. I would recommend this one only to those with a serious interest in the development of the 'Egyptian' theme in Victorian weird fiction. Well, that's what you get for trusting an Irishman...

An Airport Novel Takes Off: The Eye of Ra by Michael Asher

*Spoilers all over the shop*

I found The Eye of Ra in the library at work. At first glance, I pegged it as the kind of history-themed thriller that has been clogging bookshelves since the success of The Da Vince Code. In fact, it was published in the late 90’s (most of the action takes place in 1995), before the Dan Brown effect made centuries-long conspiracies, Templars, and famous stuff from history necessary for thriller plots. In fact, this book takes its cues more from Indiana Jones as well as a bunch of much stranger sources, such as the work of Erich von Daniken. So, yeah, there’s going to be some ‘ancient astronaut’ theories bandied round before the sun sets behind the pyramids in this one.

The Walsingham Ghosts: An Update

2020 UPDATE: This is an article from a very long time ago. For ten years, it floated about on the internet, containing a very serious error. Originally, I mistakenly attributed the popularisation of the Walsingham Ghost tale to the famous London journalist W.T. Stead, in his 1891 book Real Ghost Stories. I then proceeded to tell various stories about Stead, including his connection to the infamous British Museum 'cursed mummy-case' and his death on the Titanic.

Whether through sloppy research or a genuine mix-up, my younger self was seriously in error. Stead never wrote about this story at all. The first book to reprint this newspaper story was in fact True Ghost Stories, written in 1915 by Hereward Carrington. Getting the names of these two books mixed-up is understandable, and Stead is not an unlikely source for stories like this. He was a prominent spiritualist, and he did after all write collections of 'true' ghost stories. However, not going back to primary sources to check was poor journalism on my part.

Carrington was an interesting character himself - a British-born investigator of the strange who moved to America at the turn of the 20th century. He was an SPR member, maintained an odd balance between skepticism and belief in mediums, and was probably best-known for investigating and writing about the 'Amherst Mystery' poltergeist case - that of the infamous 'Esther Cox, You Are Mine To Kill' quote.

I’ve written before about the Usborne Supernatural Guides. When I read them now, I’m struck by the lack of verification for each story. Some of them are well-known cases of the paranormal, but many are not. So where did these stories come from? How did the writers decide which ones to include? With this in mind, I attempted to track down the origins of one of the most interesting tales in the Ghosts, Spectres & Haunted Houses book: The tale of the Walsingham Ghosts. Boy, did this one scare me as a kid, especially with those patented Nightmare Fuel Usborne oil painting illustrations. One particular image was so terrifying to me that I learned where it was in the book so that I could skip the page whenever I read it. I still loved the book even though I was scared of it, so this was quite necessary. The story starts when a farmer called Walsingham moves into a new house in Georgia in the Deep South. According to the illustrations, it was a damn-creepy Gothic mansion, to boot. He finds a bunch of bones in the house and throws them out. Locals warn that they may be human remains, but Walsingham’s a tough customer and he doesn’t care, not even when hideous moans and groans begin to ring out through the house. Soon, invisible forces begin to cause havok within the house. The artist chose to portray all of these as being the work of an evil-looking blue spectre. Here he breaks the neck of the family dog. The family has a teenage daughter. One night she’s doing her makeup when she feels an icy-cold hand on her shoulder, but can see no reflection of it in the mirror- it’s that horrible blue man again. An invisible bare-footed man follows Dad around in the garden one day. Now things get serious- another family has come over for a dinner party, but the ghosts ruin things once again. A horrible moan is heard from upstairs, then blood starts to drip from the ceiling onto the dinner table, forming a huge pool. The Walsinghams run upstairs, but there is nothing to be found. They rip up the carpet, but there is no explanation for the blood that continues to drip onto the table. Next day, a reputable chemist examines a sample of the blood and declares that it’s human blood. This entire scene should be stolen to add to the best horror movie script ever. The Walsinghams justifiably abandon the house, and according to locals, it sits empty for some time, as more moaning and screaming echoes from within. Then a guy called Horace Gunn agrees to spend a night in the house for a bet. He experiences a number of horrifying things, climaxing with this horrible image (the eyes, the eyes!)- Brr. I’m glad that’s over. Horace runs from the room, but that old blue man is still hanging around, and ‘icy’ hands grip his ankles, knocking him to the ground and then trying to choke him. By the time he escapes, he’s reportedly wound up in an asylum. Poor, brave Horace Gunn. Hope he won some money for that.

Carrington's book cites, as his source, an article in the San Francisco Examiner. Here's the beginning of it, dated to 29th Nov 1891, and locating the haunted house in the town of Oakville, near Savannah Georgia.

Another newspaper version of the story I turned up comes from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, dated Dec 5th 1891.

These seem to be the earliest available versions of the story.

Tales of Unease- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

As a child, I knew that when a bunch of well-educated men in old-fashioned dress got together in their 'club' (whatever that was) and started to tell tall tales around a great warm hearth, there were only two ways in which things could pan out- they would inevitable end up (a) somewhere exotic, such as jungle or a desert, or (b) in a haunted house. In either case, an adventure would ensue. Of course, no women would be present during it, for they are troublesome, meddling creatures. Such is what comes of consuming the Right Sort of Literature.

Eventually, I discovered that the particular time and place during which these adventures usually seemed to occur was Britain, about one hundred years ago, and that the reason these educated, civilized men so often wound up in wild countries was that they, in fact, owned them. Ah. And so, as night follows day, as the training-montage-scene must follow the inspirational-speech-scene, my interest in tales of adventure and the supernatural led to an interest in the age of imperialism. But what has all this got to do with the creator of Sherlock Holmes?

Tales of Unease is a collection of Doyle's non-Baker St related stories, and wouldn't you know it, it turns out to be a veritable taproot of the archetypes I mentioned above. These stories are set in a world where upper-class twits (sorry, Brits) discover ghostly goings-on in every drawing-room and college dormitory (Oxford, naturally). I've aired my grievances over Doyle's use of spiritualism in fiction before, but in this collection he gets the balance just right. His characters, though mostly Mary-Sue type author inserts, are not fools and require about as much convincing as you or I would that something supernatural is truly afoot. This adds to the mood Doyle is attempting to create with these stories- the feeling that the world is a much stranger place that we had ever dreamed, and that we are on the brink of some great, if uncomfortable, realization. Of course, most of this will take the form of tables banging in dark rooms during seances, but you can't have everything, right?





















One thing you can have though, is mummies. Plenty of 'em. In classic tales such as The Ring of Thoth and Lot 249, Doyle appears to have contributed to the then-growing idea of Egyptian curses and mysticism. These stories in particular appear to have been among the first to introduce the elements of immortality, reincarnation and lost love to the mummy cycle. Lot 249 in particular is one of the most enjoyably creepy shorts in this collection. There's little doubt that these stories influenced most of the ideas regarding Egyptian mysticism that followed, climaxing with the 'real-life' curse of Tutankhamun in 1922, as well as the 1932 Karloff movie.

Special mention must go to The Captain of the Polestar, in which the crew of a whaling ship in the frozen north begin to see strange things out on the ice. Here, Doyle is drawing on his own experiences of being ships' doctor on a whaler, and the resulting images of the endless white desert are indeed haunting. It's a great example of 'less is more'- knowing that whatever is in the readers' imagination is surely more wondrous than whatever he can provide in the narrative, the author plays it subtle with this one.

Special mentions also to The Horror of the Heights, for being the best (and only) damn story ever written about the possibility of giant sky-jellyfish living in our upper atmosphere. 'Aeroplaning' had only been around for less than twenty years when the story was written (1913). Doyle makes it seem almost reasonable-

'A visitor might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger. Yet tigers exist, and if he chanced to come down into a jungle, he might be devoured. There are jungles of the upper air, and there are worse things than tigers that inhabit them..."

It's the kind of open-ended 'anything's possible' logic that Charles Fort would be proud of, but it does allow for a thrilling adventure. (This story in particular has always stuck with me, and I used the idea in my comic Laissez-Faire. Click here to read it!)

As for the rest, well they're a mixed bag, including some downright failures (there's something about a prehistoric cave-dwelling bear-creature wandering around South Kensington that just isn't scary). But there are plenty of Victorian-age novelties scattered throughout to tide the jaded reader over. Egyptians are mysterious, Turks are inscrutable and at every turn doughty and fearless (but modest)Englishmen swallow their fear in order to confront the strange mysteries that lie just beyond the veil. Even in the most horrific of circumstances-

'-there lies deep in every man a rooted self-respect which makes it hard for him to turn back from what he has once undertaken.'

In every man? I sure hope so!

Actually, though this kind of bluff claptrap is common among Victorian fictional heroes, Doyle might just actually have meant it. The man did attempt to enlist as a private in the British army during the Boer War (when he was 40) and again during the Great War (when he was 54!). He does seem like a chap who practiced what he preached.

As is well known by fans of genre fiction, Doyle rather hoped that he'd be remembered for stories that did not involve cocaine and violin-playing. Though not famous for it today, he was as good at constructing a genuinely creepy 19th-century ghost story as any more famous names you may care to mention. And of course, there's nary the rustle of a petticoat in the whole thing, as H. R. Haggard might say. At least, not the petticoat of a living woman. Muster up some of that late-Victorian can-do attitude and track down Tales of Unease.

Tutankhamun- The Exodus Conspiracy

What do you get when you mix British colonialism, Oriental mystery and the occult? Questionable history and a stonking good story, that's what. (Dashed horrible cover, though. Bad early-noughties' CG married with overly dramatic use of religious symbolism? No thanks.) Tutankhamun- The Exodus Conspiracy is at least partly a retelling of one of the classic tales of discovery. True to form, the details of the case make fascinating reading, even disregarding the authors' bizarre claims in the latter half of the book.

Cast your mind back to Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century. As western countries became more rational, they increasingly needed to view the East as somewhere strange and Other. Life at home may have had all the mystery sucked out of it long ago, but elsewhere- the inscrutable Orient- were lands where the impossible could still happen. To men like Howard Carter and Lord Canarvon, Egypt was still a land of myth and mystery. And it was here, amid the burning sands of the desolate Valley of the Kings, that an extraordinary narrative was about to unfold.

Talk about having your cake and eating it too- the authors behind The Exodus Conspiracy cram in various (and sometimes tenously connected) aspects of the Tutankhamun story, each fascinating in its own way. So, the story of Canarvon funding just one more year's dig (after several fruitless seasons) resulting in Carter's lifelong dream coming true's not enough for you? How about Carter's personal and moral struggles against ruthless pressmen and Arab beaurocrats who (quite rightly, to be honest!) had the nerve to suggest that maybe the priceless treasures of Egypt shouldn't go directly to the British Museum? How about Carter's secret entering and resealing of the burial chamber three months before the official opening? What? You want more? I haven't even gotten to the curse yet!

Authors Collins and Ogilvie-Herald place this classic tale of discovery where they feel it belongs- squarely in the occult-obsessed culture of the upper-class Brits of the time. Belief in weird things was still common as tables floated in darkened parlours all over London and Paris. Lord Canarvon in particular is painted as having been strongly influenced by the occult. He held seances in his Gothic castle in England. He visited several psychics and mystics, some of whom warned him that if he continued desecrating tombs, he would never leave Egypt alive again... Several famous occult figures of the time turn out to have been linked to him- even old A. C. Doyle found time to comment on his doings in Egypt. And all the while, newsmen spun tales of creeping dread that preyed on Canarvon's mind. A popular fiction in newspapers of the time stated that 'death shall come on swift wings to he who disturbs the rest of the Pharoah'.

In this atmosphere, the 'curse' of Tutankhamun seems almost like the next logical step. Canarvon seems like the kind of man who would have taken such things rather seriously. By the time he dies from an infected mosquito-bite in a Cairo hotel room, raving that 'a bird' is scratching his face (and during a mysterious blackout, to boot!), you'll begin to wonder if there isn't something to this 'curse' nonesense after all. Even Carter, who famously scoffed at the curse till his dying day, turns out to have had his moments of private uncertainty and fear.

Perhaps I'm giving the wrong impression. The authors aren't writing to convince you that the curse was real- they spend quite a few pages trying to explain how several deaths associated with the tomb could have more logical explanations. But the fact remains that its a damn weird story, and some of the coincidences are very striking. But that's how conspiracy theorists think, and we're not here to read about them. Or are we?

Well, hold onto your pith helmets, because this is where things start to get really weird. I'm not going to get into it here (this review is damn-near long enough already), so if you want to read about how Tutankhamun was also the Pharoah from the Exodus story, you'll have to track this book down yourself. And if you're a conspiracy theorist who'd love to know about how Carter tried to blackmail the British authorities regarding the controversial birth of the Nation of Israel, then put on your tinfoil hat and head off to some other blog.