Ramses the Damned

About the Ramses the Damned series

Ramses the Damned began as a 1989 standalone from Anne Rice -- The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned -- in which an Egyptian pharaoh who drank an elixir of eternal life millennia ago awakens in Edwardian London after being revived by a museum exhibit, and falls in love with the young woman who discovers him. Rice left the story there for nearly three decades, until she returned to it with her son, novelist Christopher Rice, for Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra (2017), which brings Ramses' immortal circle up against Cleopatra herself, revived and considerably less benevolent than expected. A third book, The Reign of Osiris, followed in February 2022, completed by Christopher Rice and published two months after Anne Rice's death in December 2021.

Compared to the confessional, character-driven Vampire Chronicles, Ramses the Damned is pulpier and more adventure-forward -- ancient curses, resurrected Egyptian royalty, and globe-trotting occult conspiracies -- closer in spirit to classic mummy-horror fiction than to Rice's other work. It's a good entry point for readers drawn to Rice's gothic sensibility but put off by the size and continuity demands of the Vampire Chronicles or Mayfair Witches.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned (1989). The nearly thirty-year gap before the sequels means the first book was written and can still be read as a fully self-contained gothic romance/horror novel on its own; the two Christopher Rice-co-written sequels pick up the characters and expand the mythology, and are best read in order after the original. No knowledge of the Vampire Chronicles or Mayfair Witches is required, though the books share Rice's general fictional-universe sensibility.