Horror: The 100 Best Books by Kim Newman, Stephen Jones Page A

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