The Mummy or Ramses the Damned
A Novel
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- USD 6.99
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- USD 6.99
Descripción editorial
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Ramses the Great returns in this “darkly magical” (USA Today) novel from bestselling author Anne Rice
“The reader is held captive and, ultimately, seduced.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Ramses the Great lives!
But having drunk the elixer of live, he is now Ramses the Damned, doomed forever to wander the earth, desperate to quell hungers that can never be satisfied—for food, for wine, for women.
Reawakened in opulent Edwardian London, he becomes Dr. Ramsey, expert in Egyptology. He also becomes the close companion of voluptuous, adventurous Julie Stratford, heiress to a vast shipping fortune and the center of a group of jaded aristocrats with appetites of their own to appease.
But the pleasures Ramses enjoys with Julie cannot soothe him. Searing memories of his last reawakening, at the behest of Cleopatra, his beloved Queen of Egypt, burn in his immortal soul. And though he is immortal, he is still all too human. His intense longings for his great love, undiminished over the centuries, will force him to commit an act that will place everyone around him in the gravest danger. . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An uneasy marriage of romance and horror, this potboiler, first of a projected series, is marinated in sentimentality, melodrama and absurdity. In 1914, Lawrence Stratford, a shipping mogul-turned-archeologist, discovers the tomb of an ancient Egyptian ruler whose mummy supposedly already graces the Cairo Museum. The mummy witnesses the murder of Lawrence by his greedy nephew, Henry, and, back in England, where it's on display in the Stratford mansion, the mummy intervenes when Henry tries to kill Lawrence's beautiful daughter, Julie. The mummy turns out to be Ramses the Second, of superior looks, brains and virility despite his advanced years (3000), rendered immortal by an elixir. Julie falls madly in love, dresses Ramses in her late father's clothes and finally--after too many pages--succumbs (``Batter down the door. . . . The virgin door. Open it, I am yours forever.''). But Ramses pines for Cleopatra, with whom he dallied a thousand years after his own reign; he immortalizes her mummy and unleashes a killer-monster. Missing a ripe opportunity to skewer 20th-century values and sexual mores, the prolific, bestselling Rice (the Vampire Chronicles), ever-fascinated with the undead, avoids character and plot development, larding largely lifeless, sloppy prose with a surfeit of epiphanies and calamities. Author tour.
