The joey Zone
SAX ROHMER, The Whispering Mummy and Others. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2023. 295 pp. $20 tpk. ISBN: 9781614983798.
You know how dusk falls in Egypt? At one moment the sky is a brilliant canvas, glorious with every color known to art, at the next the curtain—the wonderful veil of deepest violet–has fallen: the stars break through it like diamonds through the finest gauze…
It has been a decade since these words were in legitimate print and they still shine like diamonds.
In 2013 Centipede Press published Brood of the Witch-Queen, a collection of fifteen short stories and Rohmer’s novel, Brood of the Witch-Queen. This collection, the twelfth title in Hippocampus Press’ Classics of Gothic Horror series, features the same stories as that volume lacking only the titular novel. The cover by Aeron Alfrey is a three-dimensional fever dream bearing a slight resemblance to W. T. Benda’s iconic design of The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932).
Sax Rohmer (pseudonym of Arthur Sarsfield Ward, 1883-1959) has resided for decades on this reviewer’s shelf alongside such writers as M. P. Shiel, Sapper, and Dennis Wheatley. Famous as the chronicler of That Most Honorable Eastern Physician, Rohmer neither originated “The Yellow Peril” trope (perhaps Shiel) or over extended stereotypes beyond their cultural shelf life (as much as Wheatley). Moriarty is more than matched by Holmes but Nayland Smith is a mere cypher compared to the charismatic Doctor. As with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan books however, this series is only a small part of the author’s total output.
Of the supernaturally infused novels S. T. Joshi mentions in his introduction, we should add Grey Face (1924) as worthy of revival, definitely using its original jacket depicting the title anti-hero’s hypnotic visage. What we have in this present volume are stories culled from Tales of Secret Egypt (1918), The Haunting of Low Fennel (1920), and Tales of Chinatown (1922). Sax is, geographically, all over the place, whether in London, Limehouse, the English countryside, or Burma. But his main port of call is Cairo. Saville Granger in the story “The Curse of a Thousand Kisses” is really just a stand-in for Rohmer. And the rest of us:
I had for many years cherished a secret ambition to pay a protracted visit to Egypt, but the ties of an arduous profession hitherto had rendered its realisation impossible. Now, a stranger in a strange land, I found myself at home…the only real happiness I ever knew—indeed, as I soon began to realize, had ever known—I found among the discordant cries and mingled smells of perfume and decay in the native city…it was the people, the shops, the shuttered houses, the noises and smells of the Eastern streets which gripped my heart.
Tales of Secret Egypt highlights the hubris of The Occidental which merits a role in comedy, more ofttimes, tragedy. Neither hero or villain, the self-appointed majordomo of this locale is one Abû Tabâh, “black robed, white turbaned, and urbane, his delicate ivory hands resting upon the head of an ebony came…a veritable presence…his eyes…like the eyes of a gazelle”. “The Whispering Mummy” has Tabâh and a negligible narrator help uncover the sleight of hand that is neither benevolent nor the sweet nothings murmured by a desert lich. Two outright weird tales, “In the Valley of the Sorceress” and “Lord of the Jackals” result in comedy and tragedy respectively, the first favoring Bast while the second engenders sympathy—certainly not for the main “protagonist” but the Lord of its title—Hayil Anubis!
Of the three Rohmer collections from which this material has been sourced, of most interest to readers is The Haunting of Low Fennel. Besides the aforementioned “Curse of a Thousand Kisses” (with its namedrop of William Beckford’s classic Vathek (1786)), is “The Master of Hollow Grange”. There is a great buildup of suspense in this story, only to have the author feint with the weak hand-off “That there were horrors—monstrosities that may not be described, whose names may not be written”! Although Joshi says “it’s supernaturalism is unconvincingly accounted for” this writer thinks the title story “The Haunting of Low Fennel” is a prime example of the writer at his most entertaining.
The employment of the stereotype of a blustering ex-military man is a characterization used in several Rohmer tales, in this case in the person of one Major Dale —“If Low Fennel is not haunted, I’m a Dutchman, by the Lord Harry!” Such comic interjections in these stories leaven the literal miasma of fear, as opposed to just annoying by juxtaposition. This miasma:
had the form of a man, but the face [was] not of a man, but a ghoul!…The chin and lower lip of this awful face seemed to be drawn up so as almost to meet the nose, entirely covering the upper lip and the nostrils were distended to an incredible degree, whilst the skin had a sort of purple tinge…
The dustjacket of the Pearson first edition of Low Fennel features this ifrit, albeit with less Pickmanesque physiognomy. The narrator deduces that the haunting is
something older than the house, older perhaps, than the very hills…something as old as the root of all evil, and it dwells in the Ancient British tumulus…Barrows and tumuli of the stone and bronze age, and also Roman shrines, seem frequently to be productive of such emanations.
Major Dale will have none of this folk horror:
Then is the place haunted by the spirit of some uneasy Ancient Briton or something of that sort, Addison? Hang it all! You can’t tell me a fairy tale like that! A ghost going back to pre-Roman days is a bit too ancient for me, my boy—too hoary, by the Lord Harry!
Tales of Chinatown’s 1949 Popular Library edition boasts a superb Rudolph Belarski cover depicting “The Hand of the Mandarin Quong”. This book also contains Rohmer’s finest short story, “Tcheriapin” with its fatalistic narrative of revenge employing “magic” somewhat prefiguring that in A. Merritt’s Burn, Witch, Burn! (1933). Reprinted many times – Virgil Finlay’s illustration for its appearance in Famous Fantastic Mysteries of July 1951 being notable – the plot of this tale need not be elaborated upon, suffice to say the dark beauty of its telling has a denouement as “hard as a diamond”. If there is one reason to add this Hippocampus collection of Sax Rohmer to your bookshelf, this and accompanying arrangements in adamantine are requisite to full celebration of The Black Mass that is classic horror.