Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra
Description
Praise for Anne Rice and Christopher Rice's RAMSES THE DAMNED "It's got the Edwardian feel that we've come to expect of Anne Rice's best novels, and it's got something more ... Tying feudal pasts with modern passions, Anne Rice and Christopher Rice have crafted a supreme sequel." -- Mountain Times.com "An entertaining soap opera replete with romantic alliances, betrayals, and ends left tantalizingly loose as grist for sequels. Fans of both authors' work will enjoy this one." -- Publishers Weekly "Mesmerizing ... mother and son have triumphed in their first team-up effort. ... An enthralling story rendered with the full flourish of a classic Rice tale ... a superb, philosophically deep sequel to 1989's The Mummy . This mother/son team-up is a resounding success and leaves us eager for more." --Andrea Sefler, Pop Mythology "Rice ( Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis , 2016) continues the tale begun almost 30 years ago in The Mummy (1989) with the help of her novelist son, Christopher ( The Heavens Rise , 2013), and it has been worth the wait. This thrilling read blends historial fiction, fantasy, and romance into a book readers will not be able to put down." -- Booklist ANNE RICExa0isxa0the author of thirty-seven books. She died in 2021.xa0CHRISTOPHER RICE is the author of twelve books. He lives in West Hollywood, California. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Proem It was a tale told by the newspapers in 1914—of a spectacular find by a British Egyptologist in an isolated tomb outside of Cairo—a royal mummy of Egypt’s greatest monarch and, beside his painted sarcophagus, a vast collection of ancient poisons and a journal in Latin, written in the time of Cleopatra, comprising some thirteen scrolls. Call me Ramses the Damned. For that is the name I have given myself. But I was once Ramses the Great of Upper and Lower Egypt, slayer of the Hittites, father of many sons and daughters, who ruled Egypt for sixty-four years. My monuments are still standing; the stele recount my victories, though a thousand years have passed since I was pulled, a mortal child, from the womb. Ah, fatal moment now buried by time, when from a Hittite priestess I took the cursed elixir. Her warnings I would not heed. Immortality I craved. And so I drank the potion in the brimming cup . . . . . . How can I bear this burden any longer? How can I endure the loneliness anymore? Yet I cannot die . . . So wrote a being who claimed to have lived a thousand years, slumbering in darkness when the great kings and queens of his realm had no need of him, ever ready to be resurrected at their command to offer wisdom and counsel—until the death of Cleopatra and of Egypt itself drove him to an eternal rest. xa0 What was the world to make of this bizarre tale, or the fact that Lawrence Stratford, discoverer of the mystery, died in the tomb itself at the moment of his greatest triumph? xa0 Julie Stratford, daughter of the great Egyptologist and sole heiress to the Stratford Shipping fortune, brought the controversial mummy to London, along with the mysterious scrolls and poisons, to honor her father’s discovery with a private exhibition in her home in Mayfair. Within days Julie’s cousin, Henry, made frantic claims that the mummy had risen from its sarcophagus and tried to murder him, and talk of a mummy’s curse astonished Londoners. Before rumors could die down, Julie appeared in public with a mysterious blue-eyed Egyptian named Reginald Ramsey, who then journeyed with Julie back to Cairo in the company of beloved friends Elliott, the Earl of Rutherford, and his young son, Alex Savarell, and the aggrieved Henry. xa0 More shocking events unfolded. xa0 An unidentified corpse stolen from the Cairo Museum, grisly murders amongst the European shopkeepers of the city, and Ramsey himself sought by the Cairo police, and the disappearance of Henry. Finally, a fiery explosion left baffled witnesses and a frantic Alex Savarell grieving for a nameless woman who had fled the Cairo Opera House in terror, driving her motorcar into the path of an oncoming train. xa0 Out of chaos and mystery, Julie Stratford emerged as the devoted fiancée of the enigmatic Reginald Ramsey, traveling Europe with her beloved, while in England the Savarell family sought to understand the exile of the Earl of Rutherford and the grief of young Alex for the woman he had so tragically lost to the flames in the Egyptian desert. Gossip dies down; newspapers move on. xa0 As our story opens, the country estate of the Earl of Rutherford will soon be the location of the engagement party for Reginald Ramsey and Julie Stratford, as others far and wide hear echoes of the story of the immortal Ramses the Damned and his fabled elixir, though the mummified body itself, brought to London with such fanfare, has long since vanished. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Read more
Features & Highlights
- 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.
