To Wake The Dead by Richard Laymon

". . .a by-the-numbers walking mummy, teen horror movie with some kinky twists."

". . .new kind of serial killer. . ."

". . .mourn the final destruction of the mummy."

During a bungled robbery, the seal of Osiris has been broken on the coffin of Amara, Princess of Egypt and supposed wife of the evil god Set. Now the red-haired mummy with a great set of chompers walks the earth at night devouring all who would stand in her way as she searches for her lost devil child.

The public is first introduced to this new kind of serial killer when several night watchmen from the Charles Ward Museum are discovered dead (literally chewed to death) after a series of break-ins in the Callahan collection of Egyptian antiquities. In the daytime Amara''s inanimate, nude, beef jerky-like body is discovered out of her coffin and in a variety of odd places. What kind of crazed killer would wreak such havoc while dumping an ancient artifact around the city? And what have a variety of missing persons who have vanished in the surrounding canyons got to do with this cruel curse?

In TO WAKE THE DEAD, a boatload of characters–some with decidedly sadomasochistic tendencies–haunt the greater Los Angeles area and inadvertently get mixed-up in the malevolent mummy''s revenge. But unless the reader is easily upset by graphic depictions of perverted sexual practices, the horror element in this story is decidedly low key and the suspense element negligible. Like most teen horror flicks the body count mounts exponentially as the monster gets closer to its goal. In the end, however, the reader will only mourn the final destruction of the mummy considering that the pathetic humans aren''t even as "fleshed-out" as bony Amara is.
Reviewer: Cindy Appel