The Whispering Mummy and Others by Sax Rohmer

• The Classics of Gothic Horror Series
• Edited by S. T. Joshi
• 295 pp
• Paperback: ISBN 9781614983798
• Cover art by Aeron Alfrey
• Cover design by Daniel V. Sauer

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.