Self-inflicted childhood trauma of wiffly_shwoo no. 178
When I was really little, I managed to traumatise myself reading a scary story.
The story was meant to be scary - it was called The Mummy - but it was abridged into children's format by Ladybird books (under their Horror Classics series). So surely pretty innocuous, right? Well not to 7 year old wiffly_shwoo apparently.
I did make desultory attempts to locate it, years ago, but when I found images of the cover, there was no author, and when I found it on Amazon it listed the person who'd re-told it. not the author of the original work. I remembered that even my 7 year old self had recognised the author as someone famous at the time, but who..?
My search was hampered by the fact that everybody and his dog have written / filmed something called The Mummy.
A few weeks ago, spurred by reading a bumper book of Nyarlathotep stories (so someone attacked the museum curator and the only thing taken was a mummy and you can't work out how they broke in - surely you can see where this is heading, dumb-ass?) I was reminded of it.
After a bit of Googling made that much harder by the fact the original story wasn't named The Mummy I found it. It's called Lot 249, and it's by Arthur Conan Doyle of all people. According to Wikipedia ""Lot No. 249" was the first story to depict a reanimated mummy as a sinister, predatory figure and had a profound influence on the horror movie genre throughout the 20th century." By the guy who wrote Sherlock Holmes. Weird. (Actually the intro points out that he wrote loads of other stuff in loads of genres and was bored by Sherlock Holmes waaay before the public were).
Anyway, for the princely sum of 1p I now have a brand-new copy of a collection Conan Doyle supernatural stories, and have re-read that damn mummy one. It was pretty cool. I'd imagine the the the passing of 23 years has a lot to do with it, but I don't understand what scared me. The weird thing is it wouldn't have seemed far out of place in an M R James collection (in style, setting and content) and those never made me bat an eyelid. My father used to read them to me from a very young age. Mum disapproved on the grounds Victorian horror fiction was not an appropriate bed-time story for a little kid, but I'm sure it hasn't warped me too much :p
The story was meant to be scary - it was called The Mummy - but it was abridged into children's format by Ladybird books (under their Horror Classics series). So surely pretty innocuous, right? Well not to 7 year old wiffly_shwoo apparently.
I did make desultory attempts to locate it, years ago, but when I found images of the cover, there was no author, and when I found it on Amazon it listed the person who'd re-told it. not the author of the original work. I remembered that even my 7 year old self had recognised the author as someone famous at the time, but who..?
My search was hampered by the fact that everybody and his dog have written / filmed something called The Mummy.
A few weeks ago, spurred by reading a bumper book of Nyarlathotep stories (so someone attacked the museum curator and the only thing taken was a mummy and you can't work out how they broke in - surely you can see where this is heading, dumb-ass?) I was reminded of it.
After a bit of Googling made that much harder by the fact the original story wasn't named The Mummy I found it. It's called Lot 249, and it's by Arthur Conan Doyle of all people. According to Wikipedia ""Lot No. 249" was the first story to depict a reanimated mummy as a sinister, predatory figure and had a profound influence on the horror movie genre throughout the 20th century." By the guy who wrote Sherlock Holmes. Weird. (Actually the intro points out that he wrote loads of other stuff in loads of genres and was bored by Sherlock Holmes waaay before the public were).
Anyway, for the princely sum of 1p I now have a brand-new copy of a collection Conan Doyle supernatural stories, and have re-read that damn mummy one. It was pretty cool. I'd imagine the the the passing of 23 years has a lot to do with it, but I don't understand what scared me. The weird thing is it wouldn't have seemed far out of place in an M R James collection (in style, setting and content) and those never made me bat an eyelid. My father used to read them to me from a very young age. Mum disapproved on the grounds Victorian horror fiction was not an appropriate bed-time story for a little kid, but I'm sure it hasn't warped me too much :p