One hears about these things happening...

... but one never suspects it could happen to one.

I have been, as they say, tagged by Pierre Fournier up at Frankensteinia to participate in a meme, a sort of Internet chain letter in which participants are asked to perform some simple task, put the results out there for all the world to see and also to spread the virus... er, pass the game along to others. According to Pierre (ever my taskmaster), I must:

1) Pick up the nearest book.

2) Open to page 123.

3) Locate the fifth sentence.

4) Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing...

5) Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged me.

Well, after a few false starts (M.R. James Ghost Stories of an Antiquary is less than 123 pages long, as is More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and page 123 of my edition of Edogawa Rampo's Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination is the frontispiece for one of the stories), I'm left with...

It is cratered with deep and unbleeding gun-shot wounds and when a victim stabs at it with a spear the weapon bursts dustily and unhindered through the torso and out the back. It is worth noting how close the Mummy keeps to Mary Shelley's original description of the Frankenstein monster:

I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I behild the corruption of death succeeded to the blooming cheek of life: I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.

I've obviously been somewhat liberal with the definition of a sentence but I say if it doesn't end with a period it ain't over. The book so quoted is Focus on: The Horror Film (Prentice-Hall, 1972), edited by Roy Huss and T. J. Ross and the excerpt taken from Lawrence Alloway's essay "Monster Films," which I confess I have not, though I've owned the book since the mid-1970s, read previously. Obviously, the author speaks of Hammer's mighty, mighty Mummy.

I know what you're thinking... fiction shelved with film studies - your categorizing is crap! Guilty as charged.

Anyway, I now pass the curse on to Jonathan Lapper at Cinema Styles, to Pax Romano at Billy Loves Stu, to Tenebrous Kate at Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire, to Sarah Fobes at Sarahnomics and Unkle Lancifer and Aunt John at Kindertrauma.

Now I can rest.