The Mummy's Foot (Théophile Gautier)

Let's set the scene for my summer reading!  As you all know, I'm a librarian, and as a librarian, I naturally have a large personal collection of books to dip into.   But, that being said, I also have to get a lot of my books and sources sourced from somewhere else.  Which is why I have been sending away for story after story.  I'll share my updates here.

First up, we have the story "The Mummy's Foot" by Gautier.  And I'll be honest--I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to get myself into with a story with a name like that. I had a pretty basic idea, having read the description online, but it was certainly a weird, weird story.

Our narrator visits a curio shop to pick up a paperweight, and decides while he's there, to purchase the mummified foot of Princess Hermonthis for just such a purpose. But, when he brings the foot home (after going into excruciating detail about every square inch of it) he is awakened in the middle of the night by the princess herself, searching for the missing limb.

As far as horror stories go, this wasn't really that scary. In fact, if it wasn't so weird, I'd say it was cute. Hermonthis, like Allamistakeo in "Some Words with a Mummy" is delightful, well-spoken, and surprisingly nice. The narrator is a bit dippy, but the story as a whole was pretty amusing.

So far, I'm two mummy stories in, and we've yet to have a real dastardly, dangerous one. I guess that bodes well for the rest of the summer, although I must admit that I'm far from being scared.