Modern Mummies is a new horror anthology looking to update the “mummy genre.” The anthology’s title has several possible interpretations to help guide submissions.

First and foremost, it means stories that take place in the reasonably understood present day. That means a world in which the internet, social media, industrialization, urbanization, etc. exist. Sure, some elements can be fictionalized to make a story work, but we don’t want period pieces that take place in the 1920s or in the far-flung past.

“Modern mummies” has other meanings to us too. In the short story “Asleep on the Job” by Scott Parson, mummies were described as time travelers in a sense. Through the preservation of their bodies, these characters awaken to find all that they had known and loved gone, replaced by some modern-day other. While time is certainly a key element of the equation, we also want you to think about space. Mummies all over the world are likely to find themselves in radically different locales than where they were originally buried. With these ideas in mind, we’re curious what you think a mummy might have to say about modern-day living. What might they have to say about their new surroundings and the colonialism that brought them there? How might these things influence their actions over the course of the story?

Modern mummies could also mean a modern-day person being mummified and its ramifications. We’d like you to think about how social media or our politics might react to a “new wave” of mummification. And what does that say about death in the modern era?

We are also keenly interested in seeing:

Mummies as heroes AND villains

Diverse characters with agency (we’d love to see stories with gender-inclusive, BIPOC, queer, and/or disability visibility)

Mummification from around the world (i.e. not just Egypt)

Non-human mummies

Unique, modern settings (museums are not off-limits, but we do foresee quite a few stories taking place in that setting.)