The Shade In the Sands And Other Stories is out now. Here’s a little bit about this Egyptian Gothic Horror book and the inspiration behind it.
The Shade In The Sands And Other Stories is a Gothic Horror collection of short, dark tales set in the 19th and 20th century.
These five Egyptian Gothic Horror stories are inspired by the greats who have gone before me, and I hope that I have been able to add something new to this sub-genre of Gothic Egyptomania:
- The Shabti In the midst of the Blitz of 1941, precious Egyptian artefacts are transported from The World Museum in Liverpool to nearby country houses for safe keeping. The Ecklands receive a Sarcophagus and some smaller treasures in their country home in Frodsham. All seems fine until Mr Eckland takes a mysterious woman as his lover… a woman who he’d do anything for, whatever the cost.
- Six Geese a-Laying Young Timothy Wicklow arrives at Harewood Court for a Christmas party in December, 1920. He doesn’t know the host, but as he has no friends or living relatives to spend Christmas with, he accepts. Around a blazing hearth, Mrs Virginia Dawson-Langley will tell him a Christmas story that will change his life forever.
- The Shade In the Sands Tom Parker, a young English photographer based in Giza, hasn’t taken a photograph in over six months. When the wife of his missing friend arrives in Giza on the anniversary of her husband’s death, Tom must face the horrors of what happened a year before, and prevent anything from happening to her, too.
- The Maiden’s Hand Peter’s cousin Wilfred has brought his university friends to their country home for the weekend. Peter’s uncle, a successful explorer, has many Egyptian artefacts around the house, including one he calls ‘The Maiden’s Hand’. Peter finds himself inexplicably attached to the mummified hand, and when his cousin’s guests awaken something as old as it is sinister, Peter must break the curse before the world as they know it is over.
- The Woman With The Emerald Eye Colonel Lindsay and his wife host their friends for Christmas and New Year. At an unwrapping in the colonel’s study, his elderly mother takes a macabre interest in the body of the woman on the table.
Inspiration behind The Shade In The Sands And Other Stories
I recently read The Mummy or Ramses The Damned by Anne Rice and I was utterly hooked. Ramses the Great has awoken in Edwardian London… what could possibly go wrong? While this wasn’t written at the height of Gothic Egyptomania like Bram Stoker’s The Jewel Of Seven Stars was, the themes include:
- The quest for immortality.
- Eternal love.
- Man’s ambition to defeat destiny.
- Eternal youth.
I was hooked! Ramses may have been the greatest of the ancient Egyptian Pharoahs but one of the brilliant things about this character is how flawed and human he is:
Do not do this. Yet he reached into his shirt, and reached inside the moneybelt and pulled out the half-full vial and opened the cap with his thumb without even consciously doing it. –Ramses The Damned.
Ramses, no matter how much older he became or how much he’s already witnessed and experimented on: he was still a man. I think Rice’s Byronic hero was spot on for an Egyptian Gothic Horror novel.
The eternal love in this story brought me well out my comfort zone. I’m not much of a romance reader usually, but Rice managed to blend horror with romance effortlessly. I then checked to see what inspired Rice to write such an excellent book. As well as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lot no. 249 and The Ring Of Thoth, she also mentioned H.Rider Haggard’s She.
Other Egyptian Gothic Horror Books that inspired The Shade In The Sands And Other Stories:
The Beetle, by Richard Marsh.
The Ring Of Thoth by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Lot no. 249 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle