24: [1903] BRAM STOKER - The Jewel of Seven Stars
After Dracula, The Jewel of Seven Stars is Bram Stoker’s best-known book. Although it has never attained the immense popularity of the earlier novel, it is a much tighter, more controlled work, dealing with the gradual possession of the heroine, Margaret Trelawny, by an ancient Egyptian queen of evil, Tera, whose mummified remains have been brought to an old dark house in London by the girl’s archaeologist father. The narrator/hero — Margaret’s suitor — delves into the peculiar history of the mummy, and is an appalled witness as Tera’s influence is increased through a variety of magical rituals which focus on artefacts found in the queen’s tomb. It is one of several Victorian and Edwardian works — Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “Lot No. 249” — that reflect public interest in Egyptian archaeology. It was first adapted as Curse of the Mummy, a 1970 segment of the TV series Mystery and Imagination with Isabel Black, and has subsequently been filmed twice: as Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), and as The Awakening (1980), the latter novelized by R. Chetwynd-Hayes.
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The Jewel of Seven Stars is Bram Stoker’s best-constructed novel after Dracula, and revives his themes of immortality through supernatural, and horrific, means. The single-narrator technique is equally as effective and direct in Jewel as the multi-narrator, journal/letters format used in Dracula, while the degrees of compelling suspense and uncanny complexity are maintained excellently throughout the length of the novel. A feeling of credulity is retained by the liberal descriptions of Egyptian objects and metaphysics in full detail. The jewel of the title is an enormous ruby carved like a scarab (illustrated on the cover and title-page of the first edition), embellished by hieroglyphics and a clear design of seven stars in the exact contemporary position of the stars in the Plough constellation. Among the more ghastly artefacts to be found in the London house of Trelawny and his daughter Margaret (where most of the action takes place) are the mummy of a mysterious great Egyptian queen, and her severed, perfectly preserved hand with seven digits. This mummy, found hidden in the remote “Valley of the Sorcerers”, is of a remarkable “historical” figure adept in magic and ritual, and all the occult Egyptian sciences: “Tera, Queen of the Egypts, daughter of Antef. Monarch of the North and South. Daughter of the Sun. Queen of the Diadems”. She has suspended herself in time, making all the preparations necessary for her resurrection over forty centuries later; and this is the incredible experiment in which Trelawny is engaged. Much has been written in recent years about the “Dracula notes” (sold at auction in 1913, and now housed in Philadelphia), which detail the lengthy research made by Bram Stoker into the occult, historical and geographical background of his great vampire novel. It is very likely that Stoker undertook similar extended research during 1897-1902 for The Jewel of Seven Stars, although these notes have never been discovered or annotated. The life and times of Vlad the Impaler and his bloodthirsty contemporaries have been very fully documented in various books, whereas the “original” of Queen Tera has attracted virtually no interest at all. The only historical character who comes reasonably close to the description of Stoker’s Queen Tera is Sebekneferu, also known as Sobknofru, daughter of the great Pharaoh Amenemhat III. She became Queen, and sole monarch, of Egypt after the death of her brother in the closing years of the Twelfth Dynasty. Cryptically, Stoker describes Queen Tera as a ruler in the Eleventh Dynasty, and her shortened name may have been derived from “Nebtauira” who (according to Flinders Petrie) followed Antef III in the Eleventh Dynasty. Although described as “daughter of Antef, there were several pharaohs of this name in quick succession during the same dynasty; but in Stoker’s time, Egyptologists were still arguing about the correct dates, sequence and chronology of the earlier dynasties. There were still many “blank on the map” areas, and Stoker was free to mix fact and fiction to his heart’s content. Some of the leading Egyptologists and archaeologists of the day were among the regular guests entertained by Sir Henry Irving and Bram Stoker at the Lyceum Theatre and the Beefsteak Club in London. Stoker would have had plenty of opportunities to discuss the occult and arcane lore of Ancient Egypt with these men, and numerous acquaintances like his fellow Irish-born writer F. Frankfort Moore (brother-in-law of Mrs. Bram Stoker) who had published a weird fantasy novel The Secret of the Court in 1895; and Sir William Wilde (father of Oscar) was among those who loved to retell stories of Egypt and Egyptology. Scarcely a year went by without new discoveries of pharaohs’ tombs near Luxor and Thebes, and in remote valleys. By 1902, E. A. Wallis Budge (acknowledged in the novel) had already published an impressive array of books on The Mummy, Egyptian Magic, Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life, and related subjects. The scholar J. W. Brodie-Innes (Imperator of the Amen-Ra Temple, founded at Edinburgh in 1893), who studied witchcraft and occult Egyptian rituals, wrote to Bram Stoker in 1903 as soon as he had read The Jewel of Seven Stars: “It is not only a good book, it is a great book … It seems to me in some ways you have got clearer light on some problems which some of us have been fumbling after in the dark long enough …” Few could have appreciated the hermetic and metaphysical insights more than Brodie-Innes. With the compelling and horrific sequence of events related throughout this memorable novel, only a climax of unrelieved tension and finality is possible, and Stoker achieved this perfectly. However, apocalyptic and decidely “unhappy” endings were entirely out of favour in Edwardian literature, so most of the contemporary criticism was aimed at the horrific nature of the finale, where only the narrator (Malcolm Ross) survives to tell the tale. When the time came to reprint the book in a cheap or “popular” edition, the publisher insisted on an entirely different ending, with the survival of the company, complete with wedding bells. (It is not clear whether the new “bland” ending was written by Stoker himself, or by a publisher’s editor — I suspect the latter.) A complete chapter (XVI), “Powers — Old and New”, was also deleted. This revised edition is the one which most readers of the book have sampled in the intervening eighty years; and the revamped somewhat lame ending has always been regarded as weak, a hurried anticlimax, especially when compared to the success of the rest of the novel. Several more changes were made in the two cinematic versions, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), with Andrew Keir and Valerie Leon, and The Awakening (1980), with Charlton Heston and Stephanie Zimbalist, but the modern reader is well advised to go back to the complete, unadulterated text of The Jewel of Seven Stars to appreciate the original novel fully. Not only did Bram Stoker write the greatest vampire novel of all time, he also created one of the best (if not the best) horror novels dealing with Ancient Egypt and the mummy’s resurrection. — RICHARD DALBY
25: [1904] M. R. JAMES - Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was James’ first collection. It consists of two previously published pieces and several others “which were read to friends at Christmastime at King’s College, Cambridge”. Most feature scholarly protagonists, and many focus on antique items (the whistle of “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”, the eponymous objects of “The Mezzotint” and “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook”). Although frequently hailed as a master of the suggestive rather than explicit school of horror, James’ stories actually contain a surprising amount of physical nastiness — the face sucked off in “Count Magnus”, the heart-ripping of “Lost Hearts”, the spider monsters of “The Ash-tree”. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was followed by More Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), A Warning to the Curious (1926) and The Collected Ghost Stories (1931). James’ stories have been adapted for television and (especially) radio many times: Jonathan Miller made a controversial Whistle and I’ll Come to You for the BBC in 1967, and the Corporation later annually adapted several other James stories more faithfully under the collective title A Ghost Story for Christmas. When we asked more than a hundred modern writers to contribute to this book, M.R. James was named far more times than any other author as the
most important and influential figure in the horror field.
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M. R. James is one of horror fiction’s few class acts. Like Stephen King, he can write about the vile and horrific without seeming to smear it all over himself or you. His stories are rich in atmosphere, inexorable in construction — and describe a world as circumscribed as Jane Austen’s. James’s first collection, published in 1904, was called Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. The title sums up the balance of elements in the stories. James was a brilliant medievalist and biblical scholar, provost of both King’s College Cambridge and, later, Eton. The main characters are almost always scholars, and almost always bachelors. The world is seen through their eyes. In “Lost Hearts”, the description of a Queen Anne House takes up about 140 words, while a description of the owner’s library and published articles takes up another hundred — in a 4,300 word story about a little boy. The narrators in James’ stories usually take no part in the action. They piece their stories together as historians would, through old documents or the evidence of friends. The scholarly, slightly fusty tone of voice; the professional characters; and the narrative technique all work together to produce what could be called an air of Cambridge verisimilitude. This air lends credence and charm to the tales, and defines their limits. The stories are full of unlikely discoveries of old manuscripts or relics, fantasy thrills for historians. In “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook”, for example, a researcher comes across a 16th century collection of pages plundered from illuminated manuscripts. “Such a collection Dennistoun had hardly dreamed of in his wildest moments.” But the very last page is a drawing of a demon. Here the narrator of the tale intervenes, making a sudden appearance. He describes, not the drawing which has been destroyed, but a photograph of it. “I entirely despair of conveying by any words the impression this figure makes upon anyone who looks at it,” says the narrator and then describes the figure in great detail:
“At first you saw only a mass of coarse, matted black hair; presently it was seen that this covered a body of fearful thinness, almost a skeleton, but with the muscles standing out like wires. The hands were of a dusky pallor, covered, like the body, with long coarse hairs and hideously taloned. The eyes, touched in with a burning yellow, had intensely black pupils … Imagine one of the awful bird-catching spiders of South America translated into human form and endowed with intelligence just less than human …”
M. R. James is thought of as a master of subtle suggestion. He almost never describes physical injury. But his terrors are described in great and very physical detail, and are the focus of the tales. The writing grows more specific when they appear — and there would be no story without them. The monsters are seldom ghosts. They are curses — spirits of revenge or spite or unrequited longing. They erupt into our world because a scholar has dug them up. James seems to have little interest in the wider implications of his tales either moral or metaphysical. In his fictional world, witches used to be real, as in “The Ash Tree”, until they were all burnt at the stake. The justice of burning witches alive is not questioned. What is of interest is their ability to come back as a crop of large, poisonous spiders. The aims of the stories are modest — to tell a creepy story convincingly and with a measure of elegance. In this aim, he succeeds time after time, but for a historian, he shows little feeling for being haunted by the past, or little interest in what history could really teach us. Like many scholars, his attention is not held by great and central questions. The stories have the power to unsettle because we are still not sure that our elders were wrong about witches or curses or demons. We don’t really believe in electric lights. These are conservative stories, in their means and in their ends, which they do not go beyond. Their aim is to produce a frisson of fear, untainted by disgust or broader concerns. In so limiting his aims and his subject matter, in so restricting the kinds of characters he writes about and the kinds of terrors he describes, it is sometimes as if James is shutting out many other kinds of terror, terrors which his stories sometimes begin to hint at — the terror of loneliness, the terror of the smallness of one’s own work, and most of the 20th century, with its wars and more mechanical horrors. It is sometimes difficult to remember that James is a writer of the 20th century. It comes as a surprise to find that his houses even have electric lights. His prose style, his narrators with their letters and documents, even the kinds of people he writes about all seem to belong to a previous era. It is as if James is using old terrors to drive out new ones. In any event it was a very specific kind of engine that drove James’s writing. He produced no other fiction than ghost stories — and those of an antiquary at that. — GEOFF RYMAN
Horror: The 100 Best Books Page 8