As you probably know already, I am an Egyptophile, and this project has been a real labour of love for me. Of the thirty-two tales included, half of them were written by women, a third have not been republished since they first appeared in print, and of the rest a number have been republished only once before. Also, though many of us tend to think of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun (death on swift wings, and all that) as the inspiration for lots of mummy curse stories being written, these tales were published between 1827 and 1939, and all but two of them appeared before Carter and Carnarvon made their famous find towards the end of 1922.
There is a 29-page introductory essay by yours truly: ‘Cure Me, Thrill Me, Kill Me! The Mummy: From Magical Cure to Murderous Curse’. And there are forty black-and-white illustrations too, some of which accompanied the tales when they were first published. The stories included are:
The Mummy (excerpt, 1827) - Jane Webb Loudon
The Mummy’s Soul (1862) - Anonymous
After Three Thousand Years (1868) - Jane G. Austin
Lost in a Pyramid; Or, the Mummy’s Curse (1869) - Louisa May Alcott
The Egyptian Amulet (1881) - Mrs M. Sheffey Peters
The Paraschites (1889) - Mallard Herbertson (pseud. of Marie Hutcheson)
The Curse of Vasartas (1889) - Eva M. Henry
Embalmed Alive (1890) - Gustave Toudouze
Xartella (1891) - Florence Carpenter Dieudonné
Lot No. 249 (1892) - A. Conan Doyle
The Unseen Man’s Story (1893) - Julian Hawthorne
Robber of the Dead (1894) - Rev. W. S. Lach-Szyrma
At the Pyramid of the Sacred Bulls (1896) - Charles J. Mansford
Pharaoh’s Curse (1897) - Lucian Sorrel
The Story of Baelbrow (1898) - E. and H. Heron (pseud. of Kate and Hesketh Pritchard)
The Mummy Necklace (1899) - Arabella Romilly
The Spirit of Amenof (1899) - Countess De Sulmalla
The Mummy and the Moth (1900) - Agnes Warner McClelland
The Mummy Hand (1901) - Adeline Sergeant
The Skirts of Chance (1902) - Beatrice Heron-Maxwell
The Dead Hand (1904) - Hester White
A Professor of Egyptology (1904) - Guy Boothby
The Bulb (1906) - Clive Pemberton
The Soul of a Mummy (1908) - Blanche Bloor Schleppy
The Secret of Horeb-Ra-Men (1909) - Edwin Wooton
The Case of Professor Engelbach (1909) - Derek Vane (pseud. of Blanche Eaton Back)
The Necklace of Dreams (1910) - W. G. Peasgood
The Dead Face (1910) - Frederick Graves
Smith and the Pharaohs (1913) - H. Rider Haggard
The Mummy’s Foot (1914) - Jessie Adelaide Middleton
Black Coffee (1929) - Jeffery Farnol
The Mummy of Ret-Seh (1939) - A. Hyatt Verrill
ISBN-13: 978-1-917113-17-5
Hardback with dust jacket, 22.86cm x 15.24cm (6" x 9"), 618 pages
Published: 15 July 2026
The book is available to pre-order from the Nezu Press store (please click here); global shipping is available (with no tariffs for US customers). Alternatively, it will be available from the usual online retailers soon, and you can order it from bricks-and-mortar stores.
Now, I’ve had a good old chuckle at some of the real-life curse stories I’ve come across over the years. You know the sort of thing: reports of endless things going wrong when a person so much as looks at a mummy case sideways. But I have to admit that while putting together the cover for this book, and working with the image of the coffin of Lady Tadi-en-hent awy, I have never encountered so many problems during what is usually a straightforward process. In the end, it took five hours to assemble the jacket. Sections of artwork moved without anyone touching them (the text section on the back cover repeatedly moved closer to the coffin on the front), and the colours changed every time the final file was saved. After going back and starting from scratch, the shenanigans began all over again. The design software presets repeatedly unset themselves, spaces in the text disappeared, the titles changed colour, and I half expected the final jacket file to be rejected by the printer! Thankfully, everything worked out in the end.
Lady Tadi-en-hent awy’s coffin resides in Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, and I used to visit it regularly when I was a child. It’s one of two Egyptian coffins in the museum’s collection, and the other, that of Namenkhetamun, still contains the mummy (the name is that of a lady, but the mummy inside is apparently male). Anyway, I hope that Lady Tadi-en-hent awy approves of the cover. It was important to the ancient Egyptians that they were remembered after death, so I think she'll be pleased about you all knowing her name.
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