The Shabti, by Megaera C. Lorenz

[Ulysses]

The Shabti
By Megaera C. Lorenz
Published by CamCat Books, 2024
Five stars
Reviewed by Ulysses Grant Dietz, author of Cliffhanger (JMS Books, 2021)

Megaera Lorenz’s Shabti is both interesting and exciting, a literate mash-up of two topics (spiritualism and Egyptomania) unlike any book I’ve encountered before. While there is a strong romantic element (something I care about a lot), it is restrained and intentionally low key. Indeed most of the narrative is low-key—quiet and thoughtful, like its two main characters, Dashiel Quicke and Hermann Goschalk.

The year is 1934, two years after the release of Boris Karloff’s iconic horror film, The Mummy. Dashiel is a formerly celebrated spiritualist, now committed to exposing the chicanery of the spiritualism racket. In the course of one of his anti-spiritualism performances, he uses an audience member as an unwitting stooge, in order to expose the tricks of his former trade. This meek, tweedy man is Hermann Goschalk, an Egyptology professor at the local university.

The story kicks off when the professor, rather than being outraged at being made a patsy, approaches Dashiel to help him with a problem. As a man of science and history, Hermann is deeply unsettled by what appears to be something supernatural going on in the little university museum where he is the curator. Dashiel, on the other hand, is deeply unsettled by the idea that the very topic he is trying to debunk is being taken seriously by this gentle, intelligent academic.

Thus begins an adventure of the heart and mind, in which Dashiel finds himself caught up in the most dangerous work of his career, while falling ever deeper under the influence of Hermann’s kindness and unflappable belief in him.

As the author lets us into Dashiel’s checkered past and Hermann’s blameless present, the setting of the story at the depth of the Depression makes perfect sense. At a time when many Americans are struggling and turning to Hollywood and spiritualism for entertaining fantasies, Dashiel has cast off the source of his income. Struggling and impoverished, desperately clinging to his dignity and his purpose, Dashiel’s life is pushing the boundaries of despair. Hermann, safe in his college position and his studies, has built a quiet little world for himself, consisting of his students, his protective secretary Agnes, his observant neighbor Lucille, and his synagogue community. His life is far from exciting, but he is protected from the vicissitudes of the day.

At the center of the excitement in the last half of the book is the notion that Dashiel’s fraudulent skills make him the perfect answer to Hermann’s dilemma—the solving of a supernatural problem that neither man wants to believe in.

The very human monsters of Dashiel’s sketchy professional past collide with the uncanny spectral threat from Hermann’s hitherto untroubled present. Dashiel Quicke seeks absolution for his past sins in defending a harmless man from undeserved evil; while Hermann Goschalk finds excitement and the possibility of romance unlike anything he ever imagined.

With her beautifully nuanced main characters, and secondary characters who fill the stage around them with wry humor and calibrated malevolence, Megaera Lorenz has created a rich and textured novel that, in the end, is greatly satisfying.