The Jewel of Seven Stars

The Jewel of Seven Stars is a horror novel by the Irish writer Bram Stoker, published by William Heinemann in London in 1903. It is told in the first person by a young barrister who is drawn into an archaeologist's project.

Malcolm Ross is summoned at night to the house of the Egyptologist Abel Trelawny at the request of Trelawny's daughter Margaret, with whom he is in love. He finds the household gathered around an unconscious and bloodied man in a room crowded with Egyptian antiquities, and a letter of instructions from Trelawny that forbids moving him and requires those present to watch over him at all times. The smell of mummy in the room affects everyone who enters it, the doctor suspects Margaret's cat of causing the scratches on Trelawny's arm, and a brain specialist who insists on moving the patient is sent away from the house. At the centre of the story is the mummy of an Egyptian queen, and the archaeologist's intention to bring her back.

Stoker's novel was written for a period fascinated by Egyptian archaeology, and it takes up the themes of empire, the position of women and the idea of progress that ran through the writing of its day.