While you’re unwrapping your gifts this holiday season, how about unwrapping a few ancient mummies, as well? (Except, not literally. The Victorians used to do that, and it was a pretty sketchy practice…) Spirits Unwrapped, edited by Daniel Braum, is an anthology of fourteen unconventional mummy tales. It was released by the small indie publisher Lethe Press back in October and has finally made its way up to the top of my post-Halloween book pile.
The premise of this anthology reminded me of Ellen Datlow’s horror collections like The Devil and the Deep and The Doll Collection: authors are given a classic horror theme but are told not to take the obvious route. The book isn’t merely a dozen rehashings of The Mummy, with ancient pharaohs and high priests rising from the grave to find their reincarnated love and curse tomb raiders. Instead, the concept of a “mummy” is interpreted rather loosely, and the stories contain everything from bog bodies, to aliens, to reanimated pets. Even those that do involve dead (or undead) Egyptians approach the topic from an unusual angle. I initially picked up the anthology because it contains a story by my favorite author, Leanna Renee Hieber. But I found myself really enjoying many of the stories by authors I’d never heard of before.
My favorite tales in the collection were those that portrayed some sort of sympathetic mummy or “mummy.” Leanna’s story, “The Mummy of Rue de la Croix” is very on-brand if you’re familiar with her interests and her work. It’s got a bit of a Phantom of the Opera vibe, and features a fraudulent—yet ethical—medium who holds Egyptian-themed seances in a darkened Paris theater that draw the attention of a mysterious, bandage-wrapped figure. Another story, “Mummy Fever” by David Wellington, takes a slightly more traditional mummy plot line and turns it on its head. Instead of intrepid archaeologists plundering an Egyptian tomb, Keferkare-ka-Imsety is an undead Egyptian prince who strolls into the Metropolitan Museum of Art to steal back one of his canopic jars. Charmed by the brazenness of this mysterious stranger, a young flapper named Elspeth decides to team up with him for a heist. There’s also “Fog Marsh” by Rudi Dornemann, in which a sacrifice victim who was mummified in a Nordic bog rises again to find that one of her priestesses has become corrupt. She confronts the priestess and saves an unsuspecting modern woman from becoming an unwilling sacrifice.
On the flip side, I also enjoyed the stories in which the mummies were genuinely scary. Perhaps the most unnerving tale was “Into Something Rich and Strange” by Thana Niveau. In a particularly creative take on the topic, this story is set in space. The crew of a spaceship called Forever Young have been sent to investigate a potentially habitable planet and to discover what happened to the missing ship that first discovered it. When they find that pioneering crew, the explorers are confronted with a strange, ribbon-like alien species that can wrap itself around its victims and wield corpses like puppets. Another terrifying tale was Rhodi Hawk’s “Leather Man’s Holler,” which focuses on a local legend about the Leather Man who lives in a cave and wraps himself in the skins of his victims. When a thief comes looking for his friend’s lost treasure, he discovers that the Leather Man may not be a legend, after all.
If trope-filled Hollywood takes on the mummy are no longer doing it for you and you want something fresh, be sure to check out Spirits Unwrapped! The book is available only in paperback and can be purchased directly from the Lethe Press website. You can also buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process by clicking on this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Once you’ve read it, be sure to come back and share your thoughts in the comments!