“You don’t believe in curses, do you? You know –the ancient Egyptian kind…”
While parched on a Christmas vacation in Egypt, twelve-year-old Gabe is left behind in al-Jizah with his quirky Uncle Ben Hassad and cousin Sari who attends an American boarding school. She can apparently can make it to the last level in a video game called “Super Mario Land” and she can also read Arabic; while Uncle Ben is a celebrated archaeologist. Gabe also has Egyptian ancestry, his grandparents initially emigrated to the United States from Egypt around 1930, but both of his parents were born in Michigan (they own a refrigerator business). Throughout the novel, Gabe is depicted as a fairly amiable, albeit slightly clumsy, kid –his shoes continually keep coming untied. Notably, Gabe carries with him a small mummy good luck charm which he calls the “Summoner” (he picked it up at a garage sale).
Rife with many delightful allusions to spooky “mummy” tales –especially Boris Karloff’s wonderful performance in the classic Universal Monster film The Mummy— The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb predictably sees Gabe following his aloof uncle and pesky cousin as they venture down into a newly discovered chamber inside the Great Pyramid (built some 2,500 years ago, during the reign of Pharoh Khufu) with his aloof uncle and pesky cousin. Among Uncle Ben’s crew of university folks exploring the depths of the pyramid is a shady man with a black pony tail named Ahmed. He is described as “unfriendly” and even “angry” with a fearsome look in his eye.
Throughout the book, Uncle Ben is constantly losing track of Gabe and Sari, from the pyramid to the hotel, but things go awry when Gabe and Sari disobey Uncle Ben’s rules and they visit a nearby museum. Inside the mummy exhibit, they are followed by Ahmed who claims to be taking them back to Uncle Ben but he kidnaps. Gabe and Sari only narrowly escape by diving out the side doors of the car and racing back to the hotel where they learn that two of Uncle Ben’s crew working in the pyramid have been hospitalized and rendered speechless due to something truly terrifying that they witnessed.
Naturally, Uncle Ben takes Gabe and Sari back to the Great Pyramid (this time armed with homing device beepers). But when Gabe notices his shoe is untied again, he quickly becomes separated from his uncle and cousin (again). Gabe immediately slips and falls into a dark, spider-filled burial chamber of sorts, filled with all manner of mummies awkwardly staged around a large tar pit. He realizes he is standing on a vast scorpion nest before Sari and later Uncle Ben arrive to rescue him… But not before Ahmed ominously appears. He describes this room as the preparation chamber of the Priestess of Khala. She had once placed a curse on all who violated this room, and Ahmed’s ancestors have all served as keepers of that curse (Ahmed is a descendant of Khala). The other odd mummies positioned around the room were once mummified alive as punishment for entering this sacred chamber, and the two men in Uncle Ben’s crew who were hospitalized were actually shown by Ahmed what it’s like to be boiled alive.
Ahmed then attacks Uncle Ben with a torch. He sets the tar pit ablaze and begins attempting to mummify Uncle Ben, Gabe, and Sari alive until Gabe abruptly holds up his “Summoner” mummy hand/good luck charm. As he holds it up high, Ahmed recognizes it as the hand of the priestess and the mummies around the room seemingly come to life and start attacking Gabe, even attempting to toss him into the tar pit. Gabe then looks away but when he looks back, the mummies are suddenly back in their static positions with Ahmed running away. Was it all real? Or just a dark vision? Either way, Uncle Ben, Gabe, and Sari escape from the pyramid and the book ends as Gabe is reunited with his parents. As it turns out, his “Summoner” good luck charm saved the day.
The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb is an amusing little homage to classic mummy films and stories, and it features a somewhat surprising amount of grotesque body horror for a children’s novel (i.e. descriptions of how people are mummified by scooping out brains through the nose or eye sockets). For me, the high watermark of The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb is its aesthetic. R.L. Stine paints an unsettling picture of a dusty, underground, pitch-black, ancient world of curses and dark magic, a world that has not been unearthed in thousands of years. Its mysteries are both forbidden and foreboding. However, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb also offers plenty of predictable jump scares and a handful of embarrassingly corny jokes. I was somewhat unimpressed by the absentee characterization of Uncle Ben and the conclusion, in my view, was fairly confounding as the deus ex machina “Summoner” good luck charm randomly saved the day. Isn’t it a little convenient that this magic trinket just so happens to find its way into Gabe’s hands? And what are we to make of Ahmed? Will he ever return again in the future? Regardless, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb is a solid little middle-of-the-road Goosebumps adventure, even if it relies more on eerie atmosphere and mummy nostalgia than anything else.
“I had all these fantasies about going down into the pyramid with my uncle, discovering mummies and ancient treasures. Fighting off ancient Egyptians who had come back to life to defend their sacred tomb, and escaping after a wild chase, just like Indiana Jones” (7).
Stine, R.L. Goosebumps: The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb. Scholastic, Inc., New York, NY, 1993.