Recommended Reading - Eternal Unrest: A Novel of Mummy Terror

Read Eternal Unrest: A Novel of Mummy Terror

Caught in the invisible, jostling hands of the Sinai desert winds, the restless sands danced, rising off the cracked and barren flatlands as a sparkling, glassy mist. Petosiris shielded his eyes and drew a swatch of weather-beaten cloth across his mouth. The desert could be unforgiving and cruel. Even experienced travelers lost their bearings staring out at an endless golden horizon. Too easy to let the sands in, to inhale the coarse grains with each breath, and begin to dehydrate and die.

Petosiris had not come to die. The opposite, actually: he had been charged with a horrible responsibility: to harvest lives at the scale of a plague. Usermaatre Meryamun Ramesses III, was dead—murdered—and every drop of his blood would need to be accounted for with a life.

To be perfectly honest, I took one look at the cover of this book and knew I was going to recommend it.  I mean, come on!  A Novel of Mummy Terror?  How could I possibly NOT recommend that?  Who cares if it reads like it was written by a brain-damaged junior high student?  It's got mummies in World War Two!
Having already committed myself, I clicked on the sample link, bracing myself for the sort of semi-literate blather I so often encounter in my endless quest for indie adventure novels to recommend.  You will never know the horrors I endure for you, my legions of loyal blog readers.

Anyway, I was in for a shock.  A pleasant shock, this time.  Thank you, Lorne Dixon, for learning your craft before unleashing your creations on a slumbering world.  Not just learning your craft.  Mastering it.  This is one of the strangest things I've read in years, and I mean that in an entirely good way.  This is literary mad science, two things that should never go together stitched to each other, made to live, and send tottering out the door to terrorize the local village.

Just to clarify, yes, I still mean this in a good way.

Eternal Unrest has a Depression-era pulp vibe.  This is the kind of stuff that packed kids into theatres week after week for Republic serials.  It's over the top, it's bigger than life, it's scary and exciting and crammed to the gills with adventure.  It's irresistibly, boundlessly cool.

And yet, it's something else.  This is the part that just shouldn't work, but it does.  Eternal Unrest is beautifully written.  It's almost poetry.  While the story itself gets your pulse pounding and your blood singing, the individual phrases are beautiful enough to break your heart.  The end result is tremendously effective.  It's an astonishingly good book.

Read Eternal Unrest: A Novel of Mummy Terror