Erica Jurus's Blog

If you were going to bring back the early adventure epics to the big screen, what better story than a roguish professor and archeologist searching for the greatest lost treasure in history?

The Ark of the Covenant was the most important artifact of biblical times – the repository of God’s words and laws engraved personally into blocks of stone, and held in a fabulous crate built to His exact specifications.  

For anyone who hasn’t watched the 1956 movie The Ten Commandments, after the Israelites fled Egypt during the Exodus, they made camp at Sinai, where they stayed for two years. Yahweh (God) gave Moses two Tablets of the Law, on which he had inscribed his ten commandments, on Mount Sinai. Then He directed the tablets to be placed in a special chest for transport, the Ark of the Covenant.

It was to be made of acacia wood, 2.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 cubits in size (3.75 x 2.25 x 2.25 feet), with gold overlay inside and out. The box would be born with carrying poles also made out of acacia wood, inserted through four rings attached to each bottom corner. Inside, there would be the Tablets, a pot of manna, and the rod of Moses’ brother Aaron, which had miraculous powers.

Interesting specifications, aren’t they? Aaron’s staff, for example, must have been on the short side, for even if laid diagonally inside the Ark, it could only be a maximum of about 4.3 feet. If we assume that the tablets filled the space, they would have been quite large, but that’s speculation at best. And why a pot of manna?

Symbolic, presumably. As described by ancient writings, manna arrived with the night dew as “a fine, flake-like thing” like frost on the ground.  It melted in the heat and had to be gathered before the sun came up. God’s consolation while he made the Israelites wander the desert for 40 years, it would only fall for six days, i.e. not on the Sabbath, and Friday’s portion was doubled.

The Gathering of the Manna by James Tissot, By James Tissot – https://thejewishmuseum.org/collection/26365-the-gathering-of-the-manna, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8849141

Perhaps the manna was a reminder that God could giveth or taketh away, depending on how well pleased he was with his followers.

At any rate, the Ark was created with remarkable gravity. A man named Bezalel was chosen by God to build the it, “filled … with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills — to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of crafts.” (Exodus 31:3-5).

As you read further, about how lethal the Ark could be, God must have given Bezalel, and his assistant Oholiab, special protection during the construction.

Two cherubim (angels) were to be sculpted out of gold for the lid, and were to have “their wings spread upward, overshadowing the cover with them. The cherubim are to face each other, looking toward the cover.” (Exodus) The lid would serve as Yahweh’s throne, as he had told Moses: “There, above the cover between the two cherubim that are over the ark of the covenant law, I will meet with you and give you all my commands for the Israelites” (Exodus 25:22).

The Ark was to be placed within a shrine known as the Tabernacle, a tent with a curtain that prevented people from viewing the Ark inside it.  The Tabernacle was also known as the Tent of the Congregation or Tent of Meeting, where God would appear when on Earth. It was fairly elaborate, with had an inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, to contain the Ark, four layers of curtains and several ritual instruments, including a menorah. An altar and incense burners were to be placed in front of the curtain.

The tabernacle, engraving from Robert Arnauld d’Andilly‘s 1683 translation of Josephus. By Internet Archive Book Images – https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14781191601/Source book page: https://archive.org/stream/worksofjosephus00jose/worksofjosephus00jose#page/n101/mode/1up, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42024038

A complex and costly incense was made from frankincense, galbanum (an aromatic resin with an intensely fresh, woody, and slightly balsamic scent), gum resin, and onycham (a rare, ancient aromatic ingredient used in holy incense, made from the dried shell of sea snails and renowned for its pungent, earthy and musk-like scent). It was to be burned twice a day, at morning and sunset, by Aaron, the brother of Moses, and his sons.

The Ark was so heavy that, according to some stories, it kept itself aloft (levitation?) so that the special bearers could move it from place to place.

There is a second story in the Book of Deuteronomy about the construction of the ark as a much simpler vessel for the tablets, made just of wood. Some scholars believe that multiple arks may have been constructed, used at the same time or different times, which would put an entirely different spin on things.

For the Ark of the Covenant was portrayed in writings as a fearsome thing, capable of great destruction. As it led the Israelites through the desert, it was often accompanied by a pillar of fire or smoke, and possibly emitted fire to burn away thorns, insects, and snakes in its path. Crikey!

It required strict handling and could be lethal to those not careful enough. The Law specifically prohibited directly touching the holy Ark, even by the Levites responsible for it. On a day when the Ark was on an ox cart being transported from Judah, the oxen stumbled and a man named Uzzah reached out to steady it. He died instantly, ‘struck down by God’s anger’.

It was said to be able to release blinding light and fire, and some kind of destructive energy that made it a formidable weapon, even bringing down the walls of Jericho. Yet somehow the Philistines managed to capture it and take it to the temple of the god Dagon in Ashdod. It was a bad move, as they were then afflicted with disease and had to return it to the Israelites.

All of these stories have led to speculation that the Ark was some form of energy battery, or perhaps even radioactive. Certainly the Ark of the Covenant was a very curious artifact, and its disappearance is shrouded in just as much mystery. The Ark vanished when the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem in 587 B.C.

The Ark moved around quite a bit, but eventually it was kept in Jerusalem, in the innermost chamber of the temple. Later it was thought to have been placed in the Temple of Solomon, and after that it vanished from historical record. Most scholars assume that it remained in the temple until the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 B.C., about 400 years, but it wasn’t mentioned in the list of spoils the Babylonians looted. So, there are theories that either:

a ) the Ark was taken from Jerusalem during the reign of Solomon’s son Rehoboam by Pharaoh Shishak during a part military campaign,

b) hidden in a cave on Mount Nebo by the prophet Jeremiah who said that this “place shall remain unknown until God gathers his people together again and shows his mercy” (2 Maccabees 2:7),

c) hidden some years before the Babylonian destruction of the First Temple by King Josiah, who foresaw the threat, or

d) taken to Ethiopia by the Queen of Sheba, who visited Solomon and had a son by him.

The Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum is adamant that they have the Ark, although only the Guardian of the Ark is allowed to view it. However, during World War II a scholar named Edward Ullendorff saw the Ark and said it wasn’t the original. But if there actually were more than one Ark..?

The Lemba people of South Africa and Zimbabwe claim that their ancestors have the Ark, and call it the ngoma lungundu “voice of God”. Their ancestors brought it south and hid it in a deep cave in the Dumghe mountains, their spiritual home.

There’s even a theory that the Ark fell into the hands of the enigmatic Knights Templar, who at one point set up headquarters in Jerusalem 30 years after the Crusaders seized the city, occupying the area near what’s today known as the Dome of the Rock. If they found the Ark, they may then have secretly taken it to England or France, and possibly hidden it beneath the cathedral of Chartres.

The Ark of the Covenant is shrouded in so much legend that finding it would eclipse any other discovery in history.

Assuming that it could be safely excavated and handled – not sure I’d want to risk it.

The Book of Revelation claims that the Ark won’t be seen again until the end times. Imbued with so much power, by the hand of God himself, perhaps that’s best after all.

(In the meantime, you can read about artifacts with special powers around the world in my Chaos Roads trilogy )

In 1998 I, my hubby and my in-laws got to pretend we were Indiana Jones for a few hours.

Hubby & I had driven down to Florida to join his parents for a week at a family condo in Clearwater, and in the news before we left I saw a startling news item:

Three years earlier, U.S. Customs officials at Miami International Airport, searching for drugs, discovered a large crate in a Lufthansa Airlines warehouse that was on its way to Zurich, Switzerland. It had been labelled as “Peruvian handicrafts”, with a declared value of $2,764, but it aroused the suspicion of the customs people. Inside the crate, they found 208 stolen ancient artifacts, with an estimated actual value of over $1 million. However, their cultural and historical value was immeasurable.

And if not for the astute ‘nose’ of the customs agents, the mummified head of a woman dating back to 200 B.C., a gold chest plate from 200 A.D. a set of earplugs from 1100 A.D. and other priceless artifacts would have disappeared permanently from Peru’s history.

They which were seized, and would be returned to Peru. For a brief time, however, they were on display at the Florida International Museum in St. Petersburg.

As massive Indiana Jones fans, hubby & I were keen to go and see them, and my in-laws were happy to go along, so we trundled off to see “Empire of Mystery: The Incas, The Andes and Lost Civilizations”. The exhibit had been set up like an ancient Incan temple, jungle foliage and all, to showcase these artifacts of Peruvian culture, and I have to say, we had so much fun wandering through it.

Looting of artifacts, whether from their original location or from museums that have them in their collections, is a vast and profitable business. Before archeology became a regulated science, many ancient parts of Egypt and Greece were straight up ‘looted’ by pseudo-archeologists like Giovanni Battista Belzoni, who had no formal training and treated Egypt as his personal warehouse. He carted all kinds of items to England, some of which remain the British Museum.

Now, I’ve loved visiting the British Museum – you can see marvelous things there. However, they, along with most museums in the world, haven’t been the most scrupulous in obtaining their artifacts. So it’s with some irony that they’re now searching for a Treasure Hunter to recover 900 missing items. There were 1,500; 600 have been already been recovered.

I haven’t been able to find the actual job posting, but the job has been all over the news.

What would the skills requirements be for such a job, I wondered. I’m picturing someone like Professor Sydney Fox in the television series Relic Hunter – kick-ass outfit, a punch that could take out most men, and a brilliant mind that could get her and her assistant Nigel out of any sticky situation.

This is what Google came up with:

1. Investigative & Detective Skills, including expertise in the Art Market (of course) and the ability to track items through global art markets, auction houses, and private collectors; Research & Forensics (to be able to track stolen items), and “Global Outreach & Negotiation”. That would be assuming that whoever has trafficked the items would be willing to negotiate their return. Sure.

2. Specialized Knowledge, with expert Archaeological Knowledge (in this case, particularly pertaining to Greek and Roman gems and gold jewelry), Material Analysis (identifying and protecting the items in question), and proficient understanding of Legal & Ethical laws.

3. Diplomatic & Professional Skills. Oh, I like this one. Patience & Persistence; Collaboration with international law enforcement, museums, and private collectors (I’d like to be a fly on the wall for some of those meetings!); and “Risk Management”. That last one seems an understatement.

I don’t know where Google pulled these from or how accurate they are, but they seem reasonable. I can only imagine the CV of someone applying for the job. Would firearm proficiency show up on it somewhere? Or the ability to crack a whip with maximum threat? And I’m trying to visualize the interview, particularly the applicant. The mind boggles.

It’s a sad fact that looting has been going on for millennia. Almost all of the extant tombs in Egypt had already been rifled for artifacts by the time they were ‘discovered’ by archeologists, which is why the intact tomb of Tutankhamun, found by Howard Carter in 1922, was such a spectacular and famous find.

When we visited ancient Chauchilla Cemetery in Peru a number of years ago, we were shown the evidence of grave-robbing that had once taken place: bones, once someone’s body parts, strewn across the blazing desert sands. The government stepped in 1997 to preserve and protect what remained of the site.

Scattered bones in Chauchilla Cemetery from lootings – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reservedThe burials in Chauchilla are now preserved and protected as part of an open-air museum – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

The export of antiquities is now heavily controlled by law in almost all countries and by the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.

But that hasn’t stopped the trafficking. There was a fun episode of the Castle television series, Wrapped Up in Death, in which a respected archeologist decided to make some money by selling a minor mummy in a museum’s collection. Of course he was murdered, which led to an investigation that uncovered the entire nefarious plot.

The British Museum has, according to its own public record, at least 8 million objects in its collection. At any given time, only one percent, about 80,000 items, are on display. Roughly 50% is housed at the actual museum in Bloomsbury, London; the rest is in 194 storerooms.

One has to ask, what the heck do they need so many artifacts for, when for the most part, 7.92 million don’t see the light of day.

Significant pressure has been put on the museum in recent years to repatriate the famous Elgin Marbles, which are actually pieces of the frieze originally decorating the Parthenon in Athens. In the 19th century, Lord Elgin, the British Ambassador, was given permission by the Ottoman Empire, which was the governing authority in Athens at the time, to remove some of the sculptures. He did it under the guise of ‘saving them from the weather’. But Greece would like them back. The museum so far has refused. There are negotiations to return at least some of them, which Greece is well able to care for.

So again, I point out the irony of the museum trying to recover a small portion of its many treasures, which may not have the most respectable provenance themselves.

An organization called The Art Loss Register (ALR) maintains “the world’s largest private database of lost, stolen and looted art, antiques and collectibles”. They’re currently listing over 700,000 items. Not all of these ‘belong’ to museums; some are family heirlooms.

screenshot of the ALR website

But there’s another organization, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, that digs into how legal some museum acquisitions are. One of their biggest cases exposed decades of shady dealings by 1960s Director Thomas Hoving of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who sought to bolster the institution’s reputation in the world.

Journalists examined the museum’s catalogue and found at least 1,109 pieces that had come from people who had been either indicted or convicted of antiquities crimes. Fewer than half of them have any records describing how they left the country of origin, and many were removed after international guidelines were already put into place. 309 of them are still on display in the museum.

In his 1994 memoir, Director Hoving wrote that his address book of “smugglers and fixers” and other connections “was longer than anyone else’s in the field”. Well, that’s something to boast about. Although, in certain circles I’m sure it is.

So should you be considering applying for that rather exciting position with the British Museum, while packing a tidy little pistol and other appropriate equipment, you might have to leave your ethics at home. Just saying.

In Egypt, there were miles of sand, which refused to remain pleasantly flat. It made the tracks undulate so much that it gave our train a pronounced sway – so much so that at times it felt like the car holding our cabin was going to tip right over. There was also some slightly suspect food. By the time we arrived in Luxor, I was sick as a dog, and spent the entire night in our hotel bathroom. But there was no way I was going to miss the tour of the Valley of the Kings the next morning, and though wrung out, I did it, by God!

In Peru, we snaked along the unruly Urubamba River, watching clouds lower onto the tops of the surrounding Andes mountains. In places the track had been cut through the rock and we edged along sheer faces of it or through narrow tunnels. Next there might be a small grove of banana trees, or stands of prickly pear cacti. Periodically we’d pass a train making the return trip from Aguas Calientes, the town at the base of Machu Picchu, as well as piles of sacks of potatoes (waiting for transport by a more utilitarian train) and a few stacks of construction materials.

Travelling along the Urubamba River in Peru on Inca Rail – by Erica Jurus, all rights reserved.

On the Eurostar ‘Chunnel’ train, we raced from England to France so smoothly that we had no sense of the speed until we passed another long train in a flash. And if you’re wondering, it’s completely black inside the tunnel and we dozed off. Still, it was pretty cool to travel right under the English Channel inside an engineering feat for the ages.

My hubby and I enjoy all forms of transport, from horses to race cars, but I think trains are our favourite. There’s something wonderfully romantic and intimate and relaxing about them, sitting and watching a world that no motorist can see pass by through your window. You might have tea, or a meal, while you people-watch the others in your car. There’s a characteristic sound as the train rolls along the track, and the shimmy that makes you stagger slightly on trips to the washroom.

My hubby and I take trains whenever we have the opportunity – usually a specialized version transporting us to a remote location, or a local nostalgia excursion in vintage cars. To us, the experience of being on a train trip is the point, i.e. it’s less the destination than the journey itself.

And so I was sad to hear that the British Royal Train is slated to be decommissioned next year, after 158 years of service. It’s another economization by the Royal Family to keep themselves relevant in an era that increasingly questions the validity of monarchies.

I understand the move politically, the optics of spending less money. Princess Katharine wears some pretty nice duds, but she also shops at places you or I would, and re-wears a lot of items in her closet, sometimes redesigning them slightly to freshen them up.

Previous British monarchs kept themselves separate from their subjects, behind an aura of glamour and ‘otherness’. They had the mystique of being ‘ordained by God’ to rule the country (and one-time empire). Queen Elizabeth II kept up this modus operandi, maintaining strict protocol whenever she was in the presence of the common folk. It worked for her; there was just something about the way she operated that subliminally said “I am THE QUEEN”.

Princess Diana came along and completely broke that mold, doing things like hugging AIDS patients that she visited and walking around land mines. People loved her for it.

Surprisingly, despite their tragic marriage, she seems to have rubbed off on King Charles, and definitely on her sons. I watch William and Kate and am regularly impressed by how much they engage with people from all walks of life. Recently Kate visited an old textile mill in Wales, chatting and browsing the display of fabrics, and offering first-hand support so that traditional crafts aren’t lost to time.

The royal family have travelled around recurrently for many decades, and personally I feel a comfortable private train to expedite their journeys wasn’t too much to ask.

The British Royal Train began its run in 1869, after Queen Victoria took a jaunt on the Great Western Railway train on June 13, 1842 and enjoyed herself thoroughly. Nine custom-designed “bespoke” cars were made at Wolverton Works, containing offices, bedrooms and a dining car were put on the track, and allowed the royals to work and sleep while they travelled through the UK.

Class 67 General Motors 67006 Royal Sovereign. Royal train resting at Machynlleth Station while the Queen visits the town in 2010; By Peter Broster – Class 67 Royal Sovereign, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31876836

In 1901, King Edward VII introduced electricity to the cars, powered by the steam engine. In 1941 a generator was installed in 1941, as well as telephones and a radio.

Queen Elizabeth II used it frequently when she became the monarch, and there are photos of her and Prince Phillip waving gaily as it departed stations.

Today there are seven carriages. One is a day coach for King Charles, along with his bedroom, bathroom and lounge and a dining car. The rest are used by support staff.

The carriages are owned by Network Rail while the locomotives, named King’s Messenger and Royal Sovereign, are owned by DB Cargo UK, who provides engineers for each journey. Gemini Rail Services now runs Wolverton Works, where the train is still maintained, and supplies on-board personnel.

It’s been an expensive proposition, to be sure. The annual publication of the royal finances revealed that a journey on the royal train over two days last February had cost over £44,000 (currently about $82,000 CAN). Storage alone costs £400,000 each year. So it makes fiscal sense, I suppose, to turn it into a museum, with the upside that visitors will be able to step on board and imagine themselves travelling about in gorgeous clothes, waved at by throngs of well-wishers wherever the train stopped.

Trains are a delightful remnant of a less-hurried world, hovering just a few feet above the countryside as they wend their way along, comfortable and cozy. I hope they never become defunct.

Agawa Canyon Train in the autumn – by Erica Jurus, all rights reserved.

Death will come on swift wings to whomsoever opens this chest.
“It’s the curse! It’s the curse! Beware of the curse!” Beni.
“Stupid, superstitious bastard.” Daniels.
The Mummy, 1999

“CARNARVON’S DEATH SPREADS THEORIES ABOUT VENGEANCE; In Egypt, England, France and Here, Occultists Advance Stories of Angered Gods.
LONDON, April 5.—Genuine regret is expressed here on all sides at the death of Lord Carnarvon. The loss to Egyptological research is felt to be severe, and many tributes are paid to the perseverance that brought him to success, the final fruits of which, however, he was not destined to enjoy. His death has given strength to the belief held by a number of superstitious people that the hand of Nemesis pursues the disturbers of ancient Egyptian tombs…”
Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES. April 6, 1923

“Cursed be those who disturb the rest of a Pharaoh. They that shall break the seal of this tomb shall meet death by a disease that no doctor can diagnose.” Egyptian tomb curse.

The temple of Abu Simbel, transferred from a slide – by E. Jurus, all rights reserved.

In 1869, Thomas Cook & Sons began offering tours to that most exotic and mysterious of destinations: Egypt. Napoleon’s 1798 campaign to Egypt had brought some of ancient Egypt culture back to Europe, and public fascination reached a fever pitch known as “Egyptomania”. Architecture, fashion, jewellery, mummy-unwrapping parties.

Yes, wealthy hosts would unroll mummies for entertainment after dinner, with much showmanship. These evenings would often include ‘lectures’, and afterward guests could even take home scraps of the wrappings as party favors.

Mummy party invitation, available on the internet, source unknown

The mummies, sadly, weren’t difficult to obtain. The common people of ancient Egypt were interred in niches in mass graves, and enterprising Egyptians 3,000 years later were happy to dig them up and sell them – or, if desired, tourists could climb down and choose their own, like a lobster in a tank.

Thomas Cook’s new organized tours took all of the work out of visiting exotic destinations. Tourists could climb the Great Pyramid, in full Victorian outfits, and have a picnic at the top. They could then cruise up the famous Nile river on special boats called dahabiyahs, sailing in luxury as they watched the great sands of Egypt pass by.

Early Tourists Visiting the Pyramids and The Ruins of Ancient Egypt, 1860-1930, source: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/early-tourist-pyramids-ancient-egypt/

And so, in 1860, five young graduates of Oxford University, having embarked on the requisite Grand Tour to complete their education, found themselves in possession of a special souvenir. They’d bought it in the mummy pits of Deir el-Bahri, but it wasn’t a mummy – it was the coffin lid of a priestess of Amen-Ra. High-end stuff. The priestly castes of ancient Egypt weren’t to be trifled with.

One of the men went to Cairo, where he accidentally shot himself in the arm while quail hunting and had to have it amputated. A stupid accident, you may think.

However, misfortune plagued all of them. Two of the men died on the way back to England. Another member, Arthur Wheeler, managed to make it back to England, but lost his entire fortune gambling. He then moved to America, where he proceeded to lose his new fortune to both a flood and a fire.

After that, the coffin lid was placed under the care of Wheeler’s sister. When she decided to have it photographed in 1887, the photographer died, as did the porter who’d transported it. A man asked to translate the hieroglyphs on the lid committed suicide.

The lid was then sold to the British Museum. In 1904, after word of the cursed object got out a young and ambitious journalist named Bertram Fletcher Robinson published a front-page article about the artifact in the Daily Express, called “A Priestess of Death”.  “It is certain that the Egyptians had powers which we in the 20th century may laugh at, yet can never understand.”

Three years later, he died suddenly of a fever. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by then doing spirituality tours, then said that he himself had warned Robinson that he’d be tempting fate if he got too involved with the ‘mummy’. “He persisted, and his death occurred.” … “The immediate cause of death was typhoid fever, but that is the way in which the ‘elementals’ guarding the mummy might act.”

I’ve heard various versions of this ‘mummy curse’ for years. None of them have been verified, but the mysteries of ancient Egypt were running so deep at the time that the idea of some terrible retribution for disturbing their dead just wouldn’t go away.

It wasn’t helped by the death of Lord Carnarvon, financier and patron of Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, which occurred not longer after the opening of the tomb. While Carter’s find, with all of the marvelous contents of an unlooted tomb, made all the news, the ‘pharaoh’s curse’ almost stole the show.

The Discovery of Tutankhamun in Rare Color Pictures 1922 – Rare Historical Photos.jpeg Source: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/the-discovery-of-tutankhamun-1922/
(Photo credit: Harry Burton, The Griffith Institute, Oxford. Colorized by Dynamichrome for the exhibition “The Discovery of King Tut” in New York).

George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, was born in 1866. He was an enthusiastic amateur Egyptologist, and in 1907 sponsored excavations among the tombs of nobles in Deir el-Bahri, near Thebes. Director of the Egyptian Antiquities Department Gaston Maspero recommended Howard Carter to do the work.

In 1914, Carnarvon received the concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings, again led by Carter, who proceeded to search systematically for any tombs missed by previous expeditions. He specifically wanted to find the tomb Pharaoh Tutankhamun, the son of the infamous heretic pharaoh, Akhenaten. Akhenaten had tried to revolutionize Egyptian religion with the idea of a single deity, sun disk god Aten, instead of the large pantheon the ancient Egyptians had been worshipping for centuries. It didn’t go over well.

After the First World War put the excavations on pause, Carter resumed in late 1917, but five years later not much had been found. Lord Carnarvon was deciding to end the digging when, on November 4th, he received a telegram from Carter reading: “At last we have made wonderful discovery in Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact; re-covered same for your arrival; congratulations.”

Carnarvon, with his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert, hustled back to Egypt, and arrived in time to see the clearing of the stairs into the tomb was cleared. A seal containing Tutankhamun’s cartouche, an oval shape inside which the pharaoh’s name was inscribed in hieroglyphs, on the outer doorway confirmed the identity of the inhabitant. Four days later, the door that sealed the tomb was removed, then sealed by an official of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities. That night Carter, Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn, and Carter’s assistant Arthur Callender made an unauthorized visit, becoming the first people in thousands of years to enter the tomb.

Lord Carnarvon, his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, and Howard Carter at the top of the steps leading to the newly discovered tomb of Tutankhamun, November 1922.  By Harry Burton (Photographer) – The Griffith Institute Archive. Harry Burton’s photos of Tutankhamun’s Tomb taken in 1922 are on the Griffith Institute Archive with the note: “This material is published with full and free access, providing a comprehensive online resource for all audiences.” See: http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/discoveringTut/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63219055

The discovery exploded onto world news. All of those treasures, many either crusted in gold or made of the solid metal – a wonderful window into the world of the people who’d created such a fascinating culture millennia before the birth of Christ.

Then, on March 19th in 1923, Lord Carnarvon suffered a severe mosquito bite, which he then cut during shaving. It became infected, and blood poisoning soon set in in an era when antibiotics weren’t yet available (penicillin and sulfa drugs weren’t discovered until the late 1920s to mid 1930s). On April 5th, Carnarvon died in Cairo at the Continental-Savoy Hotel.

At the exact moment, apparently the lights went out across Cairo. Back in England at Highclere Castle, Carnarvon’s pet terrier dropped dead back. Then it came out that Howard Carter’s canary had been swallowed on the night the tomb was first breached by a cobra – a symbol of Egyptian royalty!

Claims that an engraved plaque had been found in the burial chamber, reading “Death comes on swift wings to he who disturbs the tomb of the pharaoh” had already spread, and the tabloid press in both the UK and US made the most of it. The intruders had been affected by an ancient curse, they said, and the Earl’s death only proved it.

When American railroad executive George Jay Gould caught a cold and died shortly after visiting the tomb, it seemed to provide more corroboration of a curse. The Daily Express newspaper in Britain reported that all over the country people had begun donating their Egyptian antiquities to museums in fear. The ‘curse’ took on a life of its own.

The idea of curses in mummies’ tombs took hold after Napoleon’s army looted treasures in the Valley of the Kings. Mummies were objects of fascination to the Europeans – so strangely preserved. There was an early Victorian stage act about unwrapping mummies who then came back to life, and then many Gothic writers, began writing stories of vengeful mummies. Louisa May Alcott even wrote one in 1867, called “Lost in a Pyramid, or The Mummy’s Curse”, followed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1892 about a reanimated mummy. How could a writer resist?

Egypt travel inspiration in the author’s personal collection. Hookah was obtained in Cairo – by E. Jurus, all rights reserved.

Every death with any association with the Tutankhamun tomb became a headline. The man who X-rayed the mummy, Sir Archibald Douglas Reid, died the following year of an unexplained illness. Fellow Egyptologist Professor Hugh Evelyn White committed suicide and left a note saying there was a curse on him, while American Egyptologist Aaron Ember died in a house fire. Howard Carter’s secretary was smothered with a pillow in an elite gentleman’s club.

Lord Carnarvon’s daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert, believed the curse story so much that she wanted to break off her engagement so that her fiancé wouldn’t fall victim through marrying her. (Hegallantly refused.)

The concept of curses goes back to ancient times themselves. Cain was cursed by God to a life of eternal wandering after murdering his brother Abel. (And if you read my trilogy, you’ll find out what happened to him!) There are curses to be found in the Bible and the Koran. In tombs throughout the ancient world , archeologists have found curse tablets and dolls, promising all manner of dire repercussions.

To this day, the idea of curses persist. The Grimaldis of Monaco apparently carry a curse that they’ll never find happiness in marriage, placed upon them by a witch in the 14th century after Prince Rainier I, the first Grimaldi ruler of Monaco, ordered her to be burned at the stake. The Kennedy family seems to have had more than their share of misfortune, after someone Joe Kennedy crossed in business during the 1920s wreaked supernatural revenge.

According to a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, our human brain likes to recognize coincidences and infer some connection behind them.

Environs of Cairo. Karl Baedeker (Firm). 1902. Egypt handbook for travellers, Leipsic : K. Baedeker.
Subject(s): Maps, Cartography, Cairo, Egypt, Topographic map, Political map, Nile River, Citadel, Saladin, Landmarks
Collection(s): Unstacked Topic(s): African History Find in: Library Catalog

We also tend to feel that objects hold memories of those who used them. We bury personal objects with our dead, save locks of hair, collect good luck charms and the like. We likely won’t touch something with a sinister reputation. (The writer in me makes note to self for my novel.) And we love stories – ghost stories in particular.

If you believe, then perhaps artifact 22542 in the British Museum, a piece of wood once covered an ancient Egyptian priestess, may have carried mysterious powers through time.

The British Museum’s archival notes for the ‘Unlucky Mummy’, as the coffin lid is known, list the following Curator’s comments:

“This object perhaps best known for the strange folkloric history attributed to it: it has acquired the popular nickname of the ‘Unlucky Mummy’, with a reputation for bringing misfortune. None of these stories has any basis in fact, but from time to time the strength of the rumours has led to a flood of enquiries.

The mummy-board is said to have been bought by one of four young English travellers in Egypt during the 1860s or 1870s. Two died or were seriously injured in shooting incidents, and the other two died in poverty within a short time. The mummy-board was passed to the sister of one of the travellers, but as soon as it had entered her house the occupants suffered a series of misfortunes. The celebrated clairvoyant Madame Helena Blavatsky is alleged to have detected an evil influence, ultimately traced to the mummy-board. She urged the owner to dispose of it and in consequence it was presented to the British Museum. The most remarkable story is that the mummy-board was on board the SS Titanic on its maiden voyage in 1912, and that its presence caused the ship to collide with an iceberg and sink!

Needless to say, there is no truth in any of this; the object had never left the Museum until it went to a temporary exhibition in 1990. This mummy-board is both a remarkable ancient object and an example of how Egyptian objects can develop their own modern existence.” www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA22542

When my hubby and I embarked on our own adventure to Egypt many years ago, Indiana Jones-style hats in tow, we didn’t see any mummies, as the Egyptian Museum was according them some respect and no longer displaying any. However, there were still a lot of mysteries about one of the most amazing cultures in history. At the time it was speculated that thousands of statues were still to be unearthed just under the Luxor temple. At the museum, the painting of the Meidum Geese, over 3,000 years old, looked as fresh as a daisy and had pigments yet to be identified.

Perhaps the idea of curses isn’t so far-fetched.

‘Indy’ and ‘Marion’ on their trusty camel in the Egyptian Sahara, transferred from a slide – by E. Jurus, all rights reserved.

Along with the eerie literature and movies that were big influences for me as a child and early story-teller (Edgar Allan Poe, The Twilight Zone, etc.), I also grew up on what I loosely call ‘sword-and-sandal’ movies.

Officially, the term ‘sword-and-sandal’ refers to a popular genre of Italian knock-off movies emulating the big-budget epics of the 1940s to 60s, like Samson and Delilah (1949), The Robe (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), etc. I use the term more literally: anything full of the sands of ancient times, sandals and togas and leather accoutrements, and, of course, lots of sword-fighting (not to mention chariots, triremes sailing the unknown seas, gods and goddesses toying with humans and the like). They were all wonderful adventures, transporting my parents and me on cold winter days to distant climes burning under the sun.

I remember a lot of those movies vividly and enjoy them to this day. Some of them may be your favourites as well: Jason and the Argonauts (1963), one of the pinnacles of Ray Harryhausen’s brilliant stop-motion special effects and still a great romp through ancient Greek legend; Ulysses (1954), with one of the greatest climaxes ever as Ulysses (the Roman version of Odysseus) finally returns home and proves who he is, vanquishing all of his wife Penelope’s miserable suitors; Land of the Pharaohs (1955), which literally had a “cast of thousands” – in one scene alone there were over 9,000 extras.

Those all stoked my enduring fascination with ancient legends, which have always been such rich fodder for writers and filmmakers. The super-popular and cult television series Xena: Warrior Princess, running from 1995 to 2001, made great use of ancient Greek legends, as well as those of more far-flung cultures, and made a personal appearance in my novels both for the Xena Club, one of the extra-curricular student clubs at Tempus College modelled after the titular character’s ethos of courage and doing what was right, and as the theme for the annual student-organized campus Halloween party.

Romy attends a meeting of the Xena Club at Tempus College, all rights reserved.

A roster of characters from Greek and Egyptian legend make regular or guest appearances in my novels, from Thoth, the somewhat austere ancient Egyptian god of knowledge and writing, to the more earthy Silenus, the companion and tutor to the wine god Dionysus. Silenus wasn’t the most elegant or regal of ancient Greek figures. A notorious wine-drinker, according to the stories he was the oldest, wisest and most drunken of the followers of Dionysus. He was usually drunk, and had to be supported by satyrs or carried by a donkey. Silenus was described as, and was said in Orphic hymns to be the young god’s tutor, but while intoxicated, he was said to possess the power of prophecy.

Silenus playing a lyre, detail of a fresco from the Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii, c. 50 BC
By original files by WolfgangRieger – File:Villa dei Misteri IV – 1.jpg, File:Villa dei Misteri II – 1.jpg, File:Villa dei Misteri III – 1.jpg, File:Villa dei Misteri IV-V – 1.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6368146

The Greek ferryman of souls, Charon, began as a minor character when I first wrote him into Romy’s story, but I had so much fun with him that he quickly became a full secondary character, showing up on a lot of Romy’s journeys. That’s one of the gifts given to fantasy writers, that we get to play with both history and mythology to suit our wild imaginations.

Charon was a psychopomp, a being, spirit or deity who guides souls from the world of the living to the afterlife. On Greek vases, he was depicted as a rough, unkempt seaman, dressed in reddish-brown robes. He held his ferryman’s pole in his right hand and used his left hand to receive the deceased. The Roman poet Virgil went even further:

There Charon stands, who rules the dreary coast;
A sordid god: down from his hairy chin
A length of beard descends, uncombed, unclean;
His eyes, like hollow furnaces on fire;
A girdle, foul with grease, binds his obscene attire.

My mind imagined him as a rather weary and cranky fellow, still unkempt and ‘unclean’ (read ‘aromatic’), but able to improve his appearance when he chose to. He became somewhat enamoured of my heroine Romy, and their verbal exchanges became so entertaining that he was a natural for a greater role.

Another character from Egyptian mythology (in my novels, many of the old legends are true), the goddess Hathor, was well known for her relationship to fertility and sexuality, but one of her lesser roles was also as a psychopomp. This becomes critical in my novels to helping Romy retain at least some of her humanity as she’s forced to push herself deeper and deeper into her powers.

A few of the mythological characters who show up along my heroine’s journey

In the past few years, the Percy Jackson and the Olympians book series by author Rick Riordan has really taken off. I’m thoroughly enjoying Disney’s streaming series based on each of those five novels. Now, I haven’t read the novels myself, and can’t speak to the accuracy of their transition to the screen. I found a lot of criticism of the series on online forums, but personally I’m having a blast watching the episodes. The prior two movies were decent, but in the series there’s so much more opportunity to delve into the mythology behind it all, not to mention the visuals and wonderful artwork that bookends each episode. If you’ve been watching, are you a fan?

Author Riordan is a consultant on the show. He wasn’t happy with the movies but does like what they’re doing with the series, so that seems important. What I particularly love is the idea behind the books.

Riordan’s son has ADHD and dyslexia. He was studying the Greek myths while in second grade, and since his father had taught the subject himself at the middle-school level, he asked his dad to tell him some bedtime stories about the heroes and gods. Riordan said in an interview,

“When I ran out of myths, he was disappointed and asked me if I could make up something new with the same characters.

Off the top of my head, I made up Percy Jackson and his quest to recover Zeus’ lightning bolt in modern-day America. It took about three nights to tell the whole story, and when I was done, my son told me I should write it out as a book.”

Percy also has ADHD and dyslexia, but these exist because of his heritage as the forbidden son of a human woman and the god Poseidon. Percy struggles through elementary school for years, but at the age of 12 he finally learns the truth, and his differences begin to make sense.

There’s been criticism that the books make children feel excluded if they don’t fit the demigod mold, but from what I understand, many children with disabilities feel validated, and the stories sometimes even lead to self-diagnosis and acceptance. My feeling is that Riordan took his son’s disabilities and turned them into something positive and heroic, and don’t we all love hero/heroine stories?

Screenshot of the Percy Jackson television series post-episode credits – by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

The series spent over 780 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, and by 2022, over 180 million copies of the books had been sold globally, translated into 37 languages and sold in over 35 countries, so clearly there’s something there that children enjoy and respond to. The first novel of the series, The Lightning Thief, is also quite popular on grade school curricula, and Riordan has put a lot of material about the mythology behind his stories on his website.

Ancient cultures developed believing that their stories about the world around them and the gods, goddesses and monsters that plagued them were all real. Though those beliefs have largely not held into the 21st century, they are rich and intriguing. They continue to enthrall us today, and who’s to say that all of the writers who bring them to new life haven’t hit on some truth after all.

I have a fair-sized library of books about most ancient cultures, for inspiration and research, including two collections of original Time-Life book series – by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

“It’s alive! It’s alive!” cries Dr. Frankenstein cries in the classic 1931 movie. I was starting to feel like his creation, plodding away with my Excel spreadsheets to plot out my novels, when I came across something that made my little old-fashioned heart beat again. Excel, the clunky, cumbersome software that apparently has become the bane of many businesses, lives on – in the form of a rousing e-sport! My choices have suddenly become relevant again!

Plotting out a novel takes some work. If you’re going to do it right, everything must progress in a logical way, even if your story isn’t told chronologically.

There are also genre-specific tropes to include – not that writers want to be predictable, but readers do expect a genre to follow certain loose rules.

In romance novels, for example, there’s typically a push-and-pull between the burgeoning lovers, with twists and turns that get in the way of what we all know is going to happen in the end. In horror novels, by contrast, there’s rarely a happy ending. Genre-blending is becoming common – there are even ‘cozy’ horror stories, where there’s little blood and gore, and people will probably live to see another day.

So, there’s obviously a beginning, and a finale, and a bunch of stuff that happens in between the two. For all three of the novels in my trilogy, I knew where each would start and wrap up. And yes, I’d always planned to conclude books 1 and 2 with cliff-hanger endings. Many readers voiced their (hopefully affectionate) frustration, but now that all three books are out, you can easily find out what happens next.

How did I make that decision? Was I just trying to hook/tease my readers? Actually, no, although that was a fun side benefit The journey of my heroine, Romy, clearly had three stages: the first terrible manifestation of her growing power, the transformation that will either help or destroy her, and whether she can then save not only Earth but the entire galaxy without losing whatever humanity she still has.

Writers make many choices – what the “inciting incident” is (the event that launches the protagonist on their journey), how much back story to include, setting the scene (each and every one) properly, when to reveal certain plot points to build suspense, what will make the most fitting ending to satisfy readers. Because it’s all about justifying our readers’ faith in picking up our book.

As you might imagine, certain genres require some tricky plotting – mysteries, and fantasy. Fantasy novels, whether urban, high fantasy, romantasy, or whatever, are usually longer books, and there’s a lot that goes into telling those stories effectively.

If they become multi-book series, the plotting becomes even more intricate, and that’s the situation I found myself in. I always knew that Romy’s story would be told in a trilogy, but as I wrote the first novel, Through the Monster-glass, and the novel grew longer and longer as the plot took shape, I became very aware of what I’d gotten myself into.

I have MS Word files on all my characters – what they look like, where they live, their back story (why and how they became the person they are when you, the reader, first meet them).

All of the buildings have pictorial files, so that I can refer to them consistently.

I drew detailed maps of the weird little town of Llithfaen, where much of the action in the trilogy takes place, and of the Tempus College campus, in MS PowerPoint.

And Excel spreadsheets became my bosom buddies for making notes about every chapter in each novel, including date, location and characters. I added extra sheets in the file for things that had to carry through to the next two books – plot points that had to be continued or resolved, questions that had to be answered (or perhaps not), ideas I wanted to follow up on, names for new characters, etc.

When laying out a novel, writers tend to generally fall into one of three types: the meticulous plotters, who work out every detail before setting finger to keyboard; the happy-go-lucky ‘pantser’, writing ‘by the seat of their pants’, as it were; and the ‘plantser’, who does a bit of both.

Stephen King labels himself firmly as a Pantser. He starts a book with a ‘what-if’ concept and lets his imagination flow. To him, the “story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest”. He calls plot outlines “last resource of bad fiction writers”.

Bah humbug, I say, although you certainly can’t argue with his success. I’m the middle-ground Plantser. I know the general plot, but I let ideas come to me as I write, and, to a large extent, the characters take on lives of their own and often tell me what they’re going to do. However, certain things have to take place to get my protagonist from the start point to the end point. I may move those things around a bit, but I don’t forego them.

King has himself admitted that he’s known the entire plot for some of his novels in advance, e.g. The Dead Zone, so there you go.

World-building also influences much of the plot. Whatever world your story is set in, whether it’s a spy novel, a crime novel, or a complete fantasy, it must be described so that the reader understands it and is willing to accept whatever takes place. Real-world criminology follows certain rules and procedures just as much as imagined magic systems in witch-themed novels.

When something is thrown in that seems just for effect, or a writer’s pet wish, it can yank a reader out of a story. I loved the Twilight novels, but the ‘sparkly-in-the-sunlight’ aspect of Stephenie Meyer’s vampires was sheer silliness to me (and to a lot of other people).

Found on a Reddit forum: https://www.reddit.com/r/buffy/comments/pes49p/found_these_on_google_i_can_imagine_giles_ranting/

In my novels, including the new one I’m working on, the Roads are passageways invisible to the naked eye that instantaneously take a traveller from one point on our planet to another. That was the premise I started with.

So then, what would such a Road ‘look’ like? Does it have form and structure? How does a person access one? How many people know about them, and how do they know? Are they entirely safe to use? When were they discovered? (And more importantly, how were they made, by whom, why??) Many questions to answer so that my construct would be believable enough – and even better, if I did it right, to leave my readers wondering whether such a thing could actually exist.

By the time my heroine discovers these Roads, they’ve been in use for a long time, and everything that she does from that point on takes into account the history, science – yes, I generated an idea of the science that would allow such a passageway to exist (university physics courses not wasted after all) – and purpose of them.

Because – and here’s the crucial point should you be thinking of writing a novel yourself – everything that shows up on your pages must have a purpose. It must move the story along. No fillers allowed. In the different books of my sequential series, even though it wasn’t immediately clear why something was mentioned, there was always a reason for it. (This is where I really got to have fun with my readers, letting them guess/try to figure out why and sometimes completely mess with their heads )

I used MS Word to write the books, PowerPoint to create the maps and storyboards, and Excel to make detailed plot notes. I did that because I’d used all of these programs extensively when I worked at a real community college, so as a novice novelist I used what was easiest for me. For my first novel, I was concerned about trying to just write the darned thing, not looking at new kinds of software.

When it came time to publish my first novel, I acquiesced to my beta readers’ recommendation to put copies of my maps, which I’d created for my own use to make sure I was keeping all the locales consistent, into the printed books. At that point I knew that I needed a decent map-generating program, and after much research I bought software from ProFantasy – not uber-complicated, but enough to produce nice, professional-looking maps. I was able to convert my book’s Word file for upload to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, and I used Canva to create the front, spine and back covers. (See, not a complete dinosaur.)

Map of my town of Llithfaen – for legend, see my Bonus Material

When it came time to move on to Book 2, I continued what I’d already been doing. There are now a variety of programs that will organize and store a writer’s project(s) for them. Some have extensive plotting features, some don’t. They all back up your work to make sure you never lose a copy (I do it myself, religiously). So far, I haven’t come across one that does everything well (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). There’s an article by Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur that gives a great overview of the most popular.

I think it’s a matter of finding what works best for you. After all, your job is to write the story, not spend weeks researching software.

And Excel spreadsheets have a new incarnation: “competitive spreadsheeting”. Now, if you’ve never used an Excel spreadsheet, they have a gridwork of cells in which you can enter numerical values, then get fancy with automated formulae that will calculate different kinds of results from that data. With those results, you can create tables and graphs for analysis and even presentation to others.

But the e-sport of competitive spreadsheeting isn’t a bunch of geeks sitting around making complex formulae. Players worldwide compete to win thousands of pounds/dollars, and a wrestling-style belt even. I had to check this out for myself!

Competitive Excel is a puzzle-solving competition, and has actually been around for about 20 years, apparently. Players have to thinking logically though a problem, with a story line, within a time limit. Originally  the game focused on math problems, as you might expect, but now the problems include things like solving a maze, or sorting kings and queens and the battles they fought in (YouTube video).

Excel tournament sample intro (from the UK website)

Competitors are given files of data and scenarios or ‘cases’ to sort though to answer a specific question, in the shortest amount of time possible. At the start of the first round they all receive an Excel file at the same time. They then have a 30-minute window to answer as many questions in that file as they can. They face five or more levels of questions of increasing in difficulty. There are also bonus questions. Each question is worth a certain amount of points, and the winner is the person with the most points.

Here’s an example of one of the rounds, where the players are given some information about Kings and Queens of England between 1066 and 1603, and then have to work out the answers to specific questions about that (e.g. Which royal house does each monarch belong to, in what year did they each ascend the throne, and so on.) There are tabs outlining the case to be solved and instructions, the list of Kings and Queens and their pertinent info, and a general timeline of events in England (not necessarily in order) during that time period. You can try it out yourself.

Sound like fun? Maybe not? In this particular game, the spreadsheets (tabs) are used to hold the information and enter the answers, so you don’t need to be a math whiz, just capable of logical thinking. Not everyone’s cup of tea, to be sure, but the sport has really become popular. The World Championships took place in Las Vegas, with commentators and hundreds of spectators, some holding banners for their favourite players. The grand prize was $60,000!

I feel vindicated. Excel is a great way to store and sort information, but it’s not for everyone. However, I pulled off three roughly 600-page novels without any egregious errors (at least none reported), and shall continue to use my preferred method for the foreseeable future. And woe to any who try to change my mind

“Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave…” Victor Frankenstein

Another year gone – it’s hard to believe that we’re now twenty-six years past the qualms of New Year’s Eve 1999. After what I hope was a lovely holiday break for you, let’s look at a super-hot trend in literature and film as we transition to a new year: Gothic Fiction.

Oh yes – Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein remake (for some reason filmmakers find this story irresistible over and over again), the upcoming strangely-costumed Wuthering Heights coming out in mid-February – dark, intense melodrama is hitting it big!

Film poster, By Netflix – Netflix (via Twitter), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80781012

Mysterious mansions with winding passageways and forbidden rooms, enigmatic/perhaps beastly owners, foreboding atmosphere, hauntings or a family curse – I was engrossed in a lot of gothic fiction when I was a teenager. I read a lot of Edgar Allan Poe, and the genre populated the majority of Hammer Films, which I’ve always been a big fan of. To this day, I love the lush landscapes and colours of those movies that create such atmosphere right from the opening scenes.

Gothic literature isn’t necessarily about ghosts and hauntings, although those are often a feature. The genre is more about the mystery, dread, even terror. There’s nothing cozy or comforting involved. The characters are not having a good time – they typically experience anxiety, guilt, and perhaps madness. The Beauty and the Beast tale is a classic gothic story that’s inspired countless retellings, of a female trapped in a dark castle with an irritable and dangerous owner.

One interesting version I read over the holidays is Alix E. Harrow’s Starling House. Set in a seedy, heavily polluted coal town in Kentucky, the heroine is a young woman named Opal, who survived a car accident that her mother didn’t. Now it’s just Opal and her ailing younger brother Jasper, struggling to survive to the point that Opal obtains the bulk of their meagre resources through theft. She’s strangely drawn to a formidably off-putting mansion on the edge of town, Starling House, and is surprised when the reclusive and irascible young owner, Arthur, offers her a job as housekeeper. Ignoring all the warnings from fellow townspeople, she accepts, both for the chance to see inside, and for the substantial pay increase that will allow her to send Jasper to college, to free him from the town’s unhealthy grip. But what most people don’t know is that the house and the town are deeply intertwined, and hold a secret far weirder than Opal ever suspects – all tied to an unsettling book written by the original owner many years before. Five stars for this one.

One book that’s listed as gothic fiction and has gotten a LOT of attention is Bunny, by Mona Awad. This is hands-down the most messed-up novel I’ve ever read, to the point where I’ve been wondering if the author was stoned when she came up with the plot. She’s a very good writer – the book just didn’t work for me, unfortunately. If you’re on Goodreads, you can check out my review there. I gave it two stars only, I’m afraid.

Mexican Gothic and Southern Gothic are two rising sub-genres. Southern Gothic capitalizes on the deceptively sleepy nature of the American South, from shady trees draped with Spanish moss to old plantations with haunting secrets. The old South is filled with superstitions, unsurprisingly given its bloody history. On a visit to New Orleans several years ago where we took a ‘Vampire, Zombie and Ghost Walk’, we learned about the notorious LaLaurie Mansion, where the mistress treated her slave to unspeakably horrific experiment, and that residents still fear vampires. Anne Rice’s now-classic Interview with the Vampire is Southern Gothic horror, filling old New Orleans with tormented blood-feeders. In the true-crime vein, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil also falls into the category, recounting the story of a sensational murder and series of trials in sultry Savannah, Georgia, which I blogged about in November 2024 after visiting the city.

Gothic atmosphere in Savannah, GA – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

Mexican Gothic transports readers to the even sultrier climate of Mexico, with its own dark cultural secrets. If you want to read something in this subgenre, try out the aptly-named novel Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, in which a socialite, Noemí, is asked to rescue her cousin from a crumbling estate deep in the Mexican countryside. Noemí reluctantly takes up the task, and finds some very strange goings-on after she arrives. I’ve only read the sample, so I can’t give a rating, but the novel gets really good reviews.

Moving farther back in time, and across the pond, I was a little surprised to see the classic novel Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, listed in the Gothic category. But the estate of Manderley on the Cornish coast holds dark secrets behind its beautiful façade, as the protagonist, a meek companion who falls under the spell of the estate’s wealthy owner, Maxim de Winter, soon finds out. She’s never given a name, in contrast to Maxim’s late first wife, the very beautiful and sophisticated Rebecca, who still casts a spell over everything even after death. From the secrets that Max withholds from his new wife to the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, there’s a deep sense of foreboding that takes hold as soon as Max introduces his new bride to his household and friends. It’s a great novel, although to be honest I have trouble reading it because of the easily-cowed protagonist. I know, I know – it’s in character for her, and sets up the stark contrast with the continued dominance of Max’s tempestuous first marriage. Well, I’ll let you read it and see what you think.

Of course, there’s the even more-famous Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë. I think the filmed versions are great fun to watch – I’m sure everyone has their favourite Mr. Rochester, but mine is the 2006 version with Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens, which I feel truly captures the seething chemistry between the two forbidden lovers.

In an even earlier era, the Gothic novel that inspired the name of my heroine, Romy Ussher, is The Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe had a dark and twisted vision of the world, which made his stories such compelling reading. In this short story, another unnamed narrator arrives at the estate of his childhood friend, Roderick Usher, who lives there with his sister Madeline, the only remaining two family members. Roderick had written complaining of an illness and asking for his help. The house of Usher is truly a crumbling domain, with a noticeable crack extending from the roof down the front of the house, and is slowly sinking into the adjacent lake. (I mean, seriously, I want to recreate it for a Halloween party!) But more than that, not only does Madeline fall into periodic cataleptic trances, but gloomy Roderick believes that the mansion is alive and that his own fate is tied to it. I won’t reveal the rest of the plot – you can read the book, or watch the wonderfully creepy 1960 movie adaptation by Roger Corman, featuring the prince of eeriness, Vincent Price, as Roderick Usher.

Theatrical release poster, By American International Pictures – http://hairygreeneyeball3.blogspot.gr/2015/04/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63231372

Well, that’s enough to keep you busy for a while, but there’s so much more. Do a search for ‘gothic fiction’ and you’ll find a lot of recommendations. Personally, as someone who wasn’t a particular fan of all the bleak, dystopian fiction that trended in recent years, I’m very glad to see the resurgence of this lushly-imagined, old-but-new-again genre.

Live well and healthy in the coming year. Pursue at least one of your dreams! Dream big.

Are the usual Christmas movies so sugary-sweet they set your teeth on edge? All beautifully-decorated-homes that seem to clean themselves, and perfect family meals that appear out of decorating-magazine kitchens?

Then take a ‘stab’ at Christmas-themed murder mysteries, or the raft of holiday suspense and horror movies.

Sometimes I’m in the mood for Hallmark Christmas movies – they’re festive and feel-good and easy watching when you’re tired. But after a few hours of small towns with enough decorations for a large city, and the de rigeur scenes of snowball fights, cookie baking, Christmas tree lighting ceremonies, town dances in a big barn and the penultimate scene of a big relationship misunderstanding, I begin to feel subversive.

It was with great delight that I discovered the movie Krampus (2015) a few years ago. The family members merged around the holiday table bicker with the best of them, although they must overcome their differences to try and survive the arrival of a very nasty Krampus during a sudden and mysterious blizzard. Creepy and great fun to watch.

Of course there are many others, from Gremlins (1984) to the explicitly-named Carnage for Christmas (2024). Rotten Tomatoes has a great list of holiday horror movies for you should you need a dose of anti-Hallmark acidity.

As for novels, the Christmas season has gestated a lot of murder mysteries. It seems the holidays inspire writers to kill people off – well, haven’t we all felt that way sometimes?

Britain, the grande dame of mystery novels, is top of this chart, and its own grande dame of mystery writers, Agatha Christie, tossed her famed Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, into a Christmas Eve murder in 1938, in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. In that story, Poirot is sent to investigate the death of Simeon Lee, a tyrannical British millionaire, on Christmas Eve. (It’s currently free to read on Kindle Unlimited.)

But she was actually beaten to the punch by a lesser-known author, Mavis Doriell Hay, in 1936. The Santa Klaus Murder features Sir Osmond Melbury, a wealthy patriarch, celebrating the holidays with his family when a guest dressed as Santa finds him shot dead on Christmas Day. The book has recently been reissued, along with another vintage Christmas murder mystery from the 1930s, Mystery in White. This collection of Golden Age mysteries is available again through the efforts of crime novelist Martin Edwards and the British Library to republish out-of-print Christmas murder mystery classics.

“The Christmas-Party Murder”, illustrated by Alex Ross, appeared in the final issue of Collier’s magazine (January 4, 1957). By Crowell-Collier Publishing Company; Alex Ross, illustrator – Self scan from Collier’s for January 4, 1957 (pp. 62–63), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64955236

Crossing the Pond, prolific American mystery novelist Rex Stout subjected his fastidious but brilliant private investigator Nero Wolfe to the indignity of attending a Christmas party in costume, upon which the host is bumped off. A Christmas Party was a short story, and is best enjoyed as episode 9 in Season 1 of the wonderful A Nero Wolfe Mystery series produced by A&E in 2001.

There are so many engaging Christmas mysteries available that I can’t list them all here, but you can check them out on Amazon.ca (or other vendor sites – or, if you’re really lucky, find a hard copy somewhere and read of an evening with a nice cup of tea). There’s even a book that might inspire you, called 12 Ways to Kill Your Family at Christmas, but I don’t recommend getting ideas! Just read/watch/dream of knives and poison and all the myriad ways of dispatching someone, without trying it at home