Why did I waste my time reading this? Ok, I read Dracula when I was, maybe, 12 years old. So, no, Stoker didn't invent the genre - more likely he just took Gautier's story & turned it into a novel. In Stoker's story, the Princess is reunited w/ her hand by people experimenting w/ reincarnating her. In Gautier's story the Princess appears in his home & tries to reunite w/ her foot. In Stoker's story there's a severed hand of an Egyptian Princess. It's a short story about a man who buys the mummified severed foot of an Egyptian Princess in a curiousity shop. Theophile Gautier, a French author who died in 1872 (long before "The Jewel of Seven Stars" was written & published) wrote "One of Cleopatra's Nights", "The Evil Eye", &, most importantly, "The Mummy's Foot". 1st, let's get this misunderstanding out of the way that Bram Stoker invented the Mummy story ("the curse of the Egyptian mummy formula which it introduced" - Keith Deutsch's afterward in the edition I have "He did invent the Mummy story, and this is the book that started it." - a quote from another Goodreads review).
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