Before I rant, a little background: I’ve always enjoyed horror stories, in particular, vampire and mummy stories. As a young teen my favorite author was H.P. Lovecraft, and one of my most favorite horror stories was The Jewel of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker which is a “mummy” story. Starting in 1984 I began reading what came to be known as “The Vampire Chronicles” by Anne Rice. The first book, Interview With the Vampire, was sensuous and atmospheric and rewrote traditional vampire mythology. Intrigued, I immediately moved to the second book, The Vampire Lestat, which was a natural continuation of the mythology, and then snapped up the third book, Queen of the Damned, as soon as it hit bookstore shelves in 1988. And that brings us to my thoughts about The Mummy. I read The Mummy while waiting for the next installment of the vampire books hoping to find Rice giving mummies the same unique treatment that she’d given to vampires. Nope. The Mummy read more like an outline of a book -- something she probably pitched to her editor and had published quickly to capitalize on the vampire books. The premise was compelling but the writing is purely awful. Sentence fragments and other bad grammar, cheesy melodramatic scenes, trite dialog, and a tendency to slip into the style of cheap pornography insulted not only my intelligence but my sensibilities throughout. Yeah, I read the whole thing hoping it would get better as the story unfolded. It didn’t.