Complete Ramses the Damned Mummy Series by Anne Rice and Christopher Rice
Anne Rice photo © Michael Lionstar, Christppher Rice photo © Cathryn Farnsworth
Looking at the three books in the classic series from the Vampire Chronicles author and her son.
“We had to make choices that were about best serving the existing material,” Christopher Rice said.
The 1989 horror novel The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned was written by Vampire Chronicles author Anne Rice (1941-2021). Taking place during the early twentieth century, the novel followed the collision between a British archeologist’s family and a resurrected mummy. At the end of the story came the announcement, The Adventures of Ramses the Damned Shall Continue…
It took 28 years for Rice to follow through with Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra, which was co-written with her son, Christopher Rice. The two co-wrote the third novel in the series—Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris—which was released soon after Anne Rice had died.
About co-writing the books
“We had to make choices that were about best serving the existing material,” Christopher Rice told The Gothic Library. “I had a lot of ideas that didn’t work. I had one big idea which we needed to let go of during the writing process, because the more I put it on paper, the more I saw it wasn’t hanging together, and that was to make Cleopatra a complete figure of villainy in the second book. As I wrote it, it just didn’t feel right.”
He remembers that his mom had initially cautioned against it, saying they should treat the character as a richer and more complex figure. Mr. Rice remembers telling his mom, Your story needs a monster.
“Then when we got into it I was like, Wait a minute. This is Cleopatra, for Christ’s sake. And the entire genius of Anne’s take on the mummy myth is that the mummy is a complex and sympathetic figure—an immortal genius, if you will—not some growling zombie-like villain.”
Find out more about the books in the series below!
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About the authors
Anne Rice (1941-2021)
Anne Rice wrote gothic fiction, erotic literature, and Christian literature. Best known for her series of novels The Vampire Chronicles, Rice’s fiction also includes the Lives of the Mayfair Witches, the Wolf Gift Chronicles series, her Ramses the Damned mummy series, her religious Christ the Lord books, Servant of the Bones (also adapted into a graphic novel), and Exit to Eden.
One of the best-selling authors of modern times, Rice’s books have sold more than 150 million copies worldwide. Her books have been adapted into films and TV shows over the years. Her Vampire Chronicles books have been adapted to the screen, including the AMC TV shows Interview With the Vampire and Mayfair Witches. There have also been the movies Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994), Queen of the Damned (2002), and Exit to Eden (1994).
Rice was born in New Orleans in 1941 and grew up there and in Texas. She lived in San Francisco with her husband, the poet and painter, Stan Rice until 1988, when they returned to New Orleans to live with their son, Christopher. Anne and her son Chris co-wrote several books. She died in 2021.
More about Anne Rice online
Related links:
The Vampire Issue: Faith Hunter, L.A. Banks, Anne Rice, Buffy vs. X-Files
Mummy Fiction Books by Anne Rice, Bram Stoker, R.L. Stine, more
Christopher Rice
Christopher Rice published four New York Times bestselling novels before the age of thirty and has twice been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award. Together with his best friend and producing partner, New York Times bestselling novelist Eric Shaw Quinn, he runs the production company Dinner Partners.
The Mummy or Ramses the Damned (Book 1)
“The reader is held captive and, ultimately, seduced.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Ramses the Great lives! But having drunk the elixer of live, he is now Ramses the Damned, doomed forever to wander the earth, desperate to quell hungers that can never be satisfied—for food, for wine, for women.
Reawakened in opulent Edwardian London, he becomes Dr. Ramsey, expert in Egyptology. He also becomes the close companion of voluptuous, adventurous Julie Stratford, heiress to a vast shipping fortune and the center of a group of jaded aristocrats with appetites of their own to appease.
But the pleasures Ramses enjoys with Julie cannot soothe him. Searing memories of his last reawakening, at the behest of Cleopatra, his beloved Queen of Egypt, burn in his immortal soul. And though he is immortal, he is still all too human. His intense longings for his great love, undiminished over the centuries, will force him to commit an act that will place everyone around him in the gravest danger...
From the iconic, bestselling author of The Vampire Chronicles—Ramses the Great, former pharaoh of Egypt, is reawakened by the elixir of life in Edwardian England. Now immortal with his bride-to-be, he is swept up in a fierce and deadly battle of wills and psyches against the once-great Queen Cleopatra.
In this mesmerizing, glamorous tale of ancient feuds and modern passions, Ramses has reawakened Cleopatra with the same perilous elixir whose unworldly force brings the dead back to life. But as these ancient rulers defy one another in their quest to understand the powers of the strange elixir, they are haunted by a mysterious presence even older and more powerful than they, a figure drawn forth from the mists of history who possesses spectacular magical potions and tonics eight millennia old. This is a figure who ruled over an ancient kingdom stretching from the once-fertile earth of the Sahara to the far corners of the world, a queen with a supreme knowledge of the deepest origins of the elixir of life.
She may be the only one who can make known to Ramses and Cleopatra the key to their immortality—and the secrets of the miraculous, unknowable, endless expanse of the universe.
Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris (Book 3)
The gilded adventures of Ramses the Damned, iconic creation of the legendary bestselling author, continue in this breathtakingly suspenseful tale of a titanic supernatural power unleashed on the eve of war.
A pharaoh made immortal by a mysterious and powerful elixir, Ramses the Great became counselor and lover to some of Egypt’s greatest and most powerful rulers before he was awakened from centuries of slumber to the mystifying and dazzling world of Edwardian England.
Having vanquished foes both human and supernatural, he’s found love with the beautiful heiress Julie Stratford, daughter of Lawrence Stratford, the slain archeologist who discovered his tomb. Now, with the outbreak of a world war looming, Ramses and those immortals brought forth from the mists of history by his resurrection will face their greatest test yet.
Russian assassins bearing weapons of immense power have assembled under one command: all those who loved Lawrence Stratford must die. From the glowing jewels at their necks comes an incredible supernatural force: the power to bring statues to life.
As Ramses and his allies, including the immortal queens Cleopatra and Bektaten, gather together to battle these threats, Ramses reveals that the great weapon may have roots in an ancient Egyptian ritual designed to render pharaohs humble before Osiris, the god of the underworld. The resulting journey will take them across storm-tossed seas and into the forests of northern Russia, where they will confront a terrifying collision of tortured political ambitions and religious fervor held in thrall to a Godlike power.
But the true answers they seek will lie beyond the border between life and death, within realms that defy the imagination of even an immortal such as Ramses the Great.
In Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris, Anne Rice, revered and beloved storyteller (“queen of gothic lit, the maestro of the monstrous and the diva of the devious” –The Philadelphia Inquirer), in collaboration with her son, acclaimed bestselling novelist Christopher Rice (“a magician; a master” –Peter Straub), bring us another thrilling, seductive tale of high adventure, romance, history, and suspense.
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