It isn’t only actors who can be typecast. Authors can have their entire career defined by a single work, sometimes to their chagrin. Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle both came to resent their fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes. It’s proven an even more pervasive issue for one of Doyle’s contemporaries; while some of his non-Holmes stories and his interests away from writing are still remembered, almost no one knows Bram Stoker for anything except Dracula.

That level of notoriety was a while in coming to the book, and Stoker didn’t live to see his creation define his legacy or to leave any thoughts about such a development. But if horror fiction is to be his mark upon the ages, then we could at least expand our view of that mark. For besides defining the image of the vampire for the modern era, another of Stoker’s novels shaped the conception of another classic movie monster — the Mummy.

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Mummy-The movie 1932
Image via Universal Pictures

Stoker’s literary output beyond before and after Dracula received modest attention at best in his lifetime and virtually none since. What commentary is has attracted is often dismissive (The Lair of the White Worm, Stoker’s last novel, was excoriated by no less than H. P. Lovecraft). The one exception, up to a point, is The Jewel of Seven Stars. Like Dracula, it is a work of Imperial Gothic, a fusion of ancient horrors and Romantic themes with then-contemporary Victorian society. Like Dracula, it follows a small group led by an aged man of science in a supernatural venture, with a pivotal role played by the female member. And like Dracula, it represented Stoker’s turn at a trend popular in British culture at the time.

In the case of The Jewel of Seven Stars, that trend was Egyptomania. Vampires had a modest cultural presence before Dracula, but Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign set off a full-blown craze for treasures, monuments, and mummies that was still lingering when Stoker began writing The Jewel of Seven Stars. Pilfered artifacts were collected by Europe’s elite, archaeologists strove to decipher the secrets of the pharaohs, and thousands of words of fiction were penned about mummies. The notion that these preserved corpses could somehow be reanimated, for good or evil, became a popular subject for Gothic fiction at any length. Jane Wells Webb Loudon pioneered both mummy fiction and science fiction with her novel The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, Edgar Allan Poe spoofed the whole concept in “Some Words with a Mummy.” Conan Doyle even took a few stabs at mummy fiction, introducing the idea of the mummy as a menace in “Lot No. 249.”

As he did with Dracula, Stoker synthesized building trends in Gothic fiction in The Jewel of Seven Stars while adding his own flourishes. Ancient curses over the tombs of Egyptian royalty were nothing new even in 1903, the year the book was published. Nor was the idea of a female mummy; more than one early effort turned on love and sex. But Tera, Queen of the Egypts, was more than a buried ruler with a cursed tomb. She was a sorceress with power over the Lords of the Upper and Lower Worlds, convinced that she could be resurrected and so elected for death while still in the prime of life. Her return was to be brought about through occult practices, but while mummified, Tera was still capable of projecting her astral body to do her will, and she may have taken an additional measure to restore herself.

Boris Karloff as Imhotep in The Mummy.
Image via Universal Pictures

The discovery of Tera’s tomb by Professor Abel Trelawney coincides with the death of his wife and the birth of their daughter Margaret. Without ever confirming it, the novel implies throughout that Margaret is either a reincarnation of Tera or gradually possessed by her. A shy young woman and a dutiful child, Margaret has no knowledge of Egyptology at the beginning of the book. When her father is injured and rendered comatose under inexplicable circumstances, she’s as in the dark as everyone. When Professor Trelawny awakens and explains his purpose – to carry out the ritual that would revive Tera – Margaret’s personality begins to shift. It’s noted that she bears a great physical resemblance to Tera, but she suddenly, intuitively knows key facts about the instruments needed for the rites. She expresses Tera’s probable wishes with great assurance. She grows more distant from her lover Malcolm Ross, the novel’s narrator, a change that leads Ross to suspect Tera’s potential influence when Trelawney and his collaborators are too engrossed in their experiment. At times, Margaret becomes cold and domineering. On the night of the experiment, she gives instructions and assent as if she were Tera herself. In the novel’s original ending, after a storm throws the ritual awry, Ross is left the only survivor. In the initial darkness, he retrieves what he suspects is Margaret’s body; when light is restored, he finds Margaret dead with her father and the others, but nothing left of Tera’s mummy but the wedding garments Margaret had dressed her in.

Ross gives voice to another concern about daring to attempt the resurrection of Tera – the collision between the ancient world and Victorian society. That the raiding of ancient tombs would bring misfortune upon the adventurers behind such desecration was a popular element in mummy stories, but in the form of a curse bringing death. Ross fears a clash of civilizations. Professor Trelawney speculates that Tera and her followers had stumbled upon forces the match of anything known to modern science and perhaps beyond it, challenging any notion of modern society’s superiority. And Tera’s successful return through her prescribed sorcery would bring an even more fundamental tenant of the British Empire’s view of itself into question. “If… the Old Gods held their forces,” Ross wonders to himself, “wherein was the supremacy of the new?”

It’s a question Ross is never given an answer to; The Jewel of Seven Stars ends abruptly with the discovery of the dead bodies and Terra’s disappearance. When the book was republished in 1912, Stoker swapped in a happy ending where Ross and Margaret wed wearing Tera’s wedding dress, any dire implications for Christianity or Empire forgotten rather than lingering to unnerve Victorian readers. The book is weaker for the change. The happy ending offers a showcase for its one major flaw: unremarkable prose through the voice or Ross, who has little personality and no role in the story except to be a lovesick observer. But the plot he observes and relates is a solid piece of Gothic horror with a captivating mythology, delightfully spooky moments, and a strong concept (with uneven execution) in the connection between Tera and Margaret.

the mummy 1932 movie image
Image via Universal Pictures

That The Jewel of Seven Stars received a reissue suggests it enjoyed some success, and it did attract some polite notices. It didn’t make many waves either, and the time Dracula went from popular book to film sensation in 1931, Jewel was lingering in obscurity with the rest of Stoker’s non-vampiric writing. And yet, when the success of Dracula and Frankenstein led Universal to make The Mummy in 1932, the resulting film contained more than a few of the same ideas Bram Stoker had put into his novel. There was the tension between the confidence of British archaeologists and the ancient practices they unearthed; a romance threatened by the effect of occult powers on the woman in the relationship; said woman being a potential reincarnation or vessel for long-dead Egyptian royalty; and the performing of life-threatening rituals to restore a mummy to life.

The Mummy is often spoken of as Universal monster without pre-existing source material, and none was credited. But the last significant contribution to mummy fiction prior to Universal’s film was The Jewel of Seven Stars. And Stoker’s innovations with reincarnation and threatened love affairs continued to be referenced in Universal’s subsequent mummy films from the 1940s and Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy from 1999. They surfaced in Hammer’s mummy pictures of the 50s and 60s, which included among their number a loose adaptation of Jewel as Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb (the only of the few adaptations of Jewel worth watching). Even 2017’s The Mummy retains a trace of these ideas.

It's a shadowy influence Stoker’s had on the mummy subgenre, largely unnoticed, and perhaps he would have lamented the lack of recognition. But in the world of Gothic fiction, an unseen force driving perceptions and depictions isn’t all that inappropriate.