King, five anthologies of stories inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon. He has also edited two anthologies of classic mysteries and, with Laurie R. KLINGER is the two-time Edgar® winning editor of New Annotated Sherlock Holmes and Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s. THE MUMMY! is considered a pioneering work of science fiction, and the first English language story to feature a reanimated mummy. Many believe that she was inspired by Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN, which had published less than a decade prior. Her first major work, THE MUMMY! A TALE OF THE TWENTY-SECOND CENTURY was published anonymously in 1827 when she was twenty years old. Born into a wealthy family, she was orphaned at the age of 17 and began writing to support herself. Loudon, 1807-1858) was a British writer best known for creating the first popular gardening manuals.

The Parasite and Other Tales of Terror by Arthur Conan Doyle The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux Other books in the Haunted Library of Horror Classics series: The first novel to feature the concept of a living mummy, this pioneering tale offers an engaging mix of comedy, politics, and science fiction. The Mummy! envisions a world in which automatons perform surgery, undersea tunnels connect England and Ireland, weather-control devices provide crop irrigation, and messages are transmitted with the speed of cannonball fire.

In recounting Cheops' attempts to put the futuristic society to rights, the young author offers a fascinating portrait of the preoccupations of her own era as well as some remarkably prescient predictions of technological advances. Cheops boards a hot-air balloon and travels to 22nd-century England, where he sets about remedying the ills of a corrupt government. Unlike Shelley's horrifying, death-dealing monster, this revivified creature bears the wisdom of the ages and is eager to share his insights with humanity.

Seventeen-year-old Jane Webb Loudon took up the theme of reanimation, moved it three hundred years into the future, and applied it to Cheops, an ancient Egyptian mummy. Within a decade of the 1818 publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, another Englishwoman invented a foundational work of science fiction. Frankenstein wasn't the only classic horror novel created by a woman.

The Mummy! by Jane C. Webb Loudon