If you peruse the later version you will not be surprised at the mummy Queen’s reduction to ashes- along with her cat. By novel’s end the sublimity of Stoker’s exquisite prose has built to a climax tensely strung and fast paced. The book begins with superb prose of a dream in which Malcolm Ross is ruminating the previous days’ events at a picnic where he met Margaret Trelawny for the first time. Of course, you would have to read Dracula to make the comparison. The Jewel of Seven Stars is more of a masterpiece than Dracula could ever have been.

My warning to you would only be that if you have no resistance to the occult and its farfetched ideas you may want to reconsider because Stoker was scrupulous in authenticating his novels with deep and accurate research. There are actually two versions of this novel whose endings are completely different and the revision to a happier ending, which was republished in its edited form nine years after the debut of 1903, quite alters the perspective and original theme of the book.Įven so, you will quite enjoy this novel in either form if you are ignorant of all that entails the knowledge of ancient Egypt and also keenly interested in educating yourself.

The reason for controversy is one you may never have suspected. This quite illustrious yarn, which entwines itself around the central characters of Margaret and Abel Trelawny, Malcolm Ross and the Egyptian Queen Tera has an insidious secret. If you have read Stoker’s novel on Egyptology it’s quite possible that you may have discussed this work with those who seemed to have a strange and opposite reaction to yours.

The jewel of seven stars