Inconvenience Store
BOOK REVIEW: The Mummy Congress
The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession and the Everlasting Dead
Heather Pringle, 2001, Hyperion
Oh cool, mummies!
Real ones!
With like hair, and teeth, and well…EVERYTHING!
Things start out just fine and creepy right from the front cover. Some kind of low light shot taken indoors, with the shutter held open long enough to make it look like normal lighting. The only living guy in the shot is a wraithlike blur, formed from his (Her? Can’t tell, it’s just too blurry.) own motion as the shutter remained open. Stacked against the walls of the room, nice and crisp, (these guys aren’t going ANYWHERE) is a group of mummies. Nine of ‘em. Whole damned crowd. And when I say stacked against the walls, what I really mean is that they’re all STANDING UP. And they’ve all got this totally distracted presence about them. Like hoods slouching on some street corner in one of those old B&W flicks from the fifties or early sixties. A perfectly surreal scene!
And it’s a lucky thing that the cover is as cool as it is. ‘Cause the title kinda makes me wonder about the contents of the book. Mummy CONGRESS? Sounds like some kind of arcane scientific seminar or something. Which, as it turns out, is exactly what’s going on. But there’s a twist. We’re not going to delve into the dry details of some damned presentation or other. Instead, we’re gonna use the congress as a jumping off point to let us examine the weird and wonderful world of the SERIOUS mummy infrastructure that’s out there. The people, the places, and of course, the objects of all the study and curiosity.
And there’s an incredible WORLD of people and places that interconnect via the peculiar medium of mummies.
Whodda thunkit?
Heather Pringle gets completely wrapped up in it all and does a bang-up job of ferreting out the bitchin’ details. She also does a bang-up job of passing what she finds along to you, the reader.
The Mummy Subculture is an incredible little world. All sorts of neato types. You’ll get to meet them all. The LIVE ones are just as cool as the DEAD ones. Nice how that works.
Unless you’ve read this thing, you have NO IDEA of just how many different kinds of mummies are out there. Each with its own fascinating story. Who was this person? How did this person come to their demise? What was it that prevented them from rotting away to nothing, the way dead people are SUPPOSED to?
Too much cool stuff!
Girls pulled out of European bogs, thousands of years later, with the rope(!) still around their neck. Artists in some garret, busily daubing away with mummy pigment! People CONSUMING mummy, as a medicinal! Mummified children, pulled from holes in the rocks, at the SUMMIT of Andean peaks thousands of meters into thin stratospheric air! Egyptian mummies sold by the TON, in whole or in part! White Guy mummies from the western reaches of China, that the present day Chinese, in all their weirdness, would rather you not know so very much about!
Ahhh…hell, there’s a whole BOOK'S worth of this stuff. No way can I list it all.
Go get this sonofabitch. Lotta fun.
A lifetime resident (despite having travelled all over the damn place at one time or another) of Central Florida, James MacLaren took a four-year degree in death thrills riding giant waves on the North Shore back in the 70's. Wound up in the inconvenience store following a lay off from the Cape, where he was involved with the construction of the Space Shuttle launch pads, among other things. Father of best son in the world.
