The Goosebumps book in which a mummy returns, but not the one from the last mummy adventure.
A year has passed, and Gabe is once again visiting his uncle Ben and cousin Sari in Egypt, where Ben has finished excavating the pyramid. Or he's excavated another pyramid; it's unclear. Anyway, Ben's colleague, Dr. Omar Fielding, urges him not to open up the inner chamber due to it being explicitly cursed. Dr. Fielding proceeds to act shady for the entire book. Could he know more than he's letting on? Well, at least the heroes can trust the beautiful journalist from the Cairo Sun who is obviously only taking a professional interest in the happenings.
This book was loosely adapted into the ninth episode of season 1 of the 1995 TV series, with a novelization based on the episode being released as book 4 of the Goosebumps Presents series.
It was reissued in the Classic Goosebumps line in 2010 as a companion release to Slappy New Year!.
The book provides examples of:
- Analogy Backfire: Gabe is hoping to find a mummy discovery in the pyramid, which Sari (who is more looking forward to possibly finding ancient jewelry) is incredulous, telling him that most children get over their fascination with mummies by the time they're eight or nine. This causes Gabe to reply that Ben clearly did not. This closing argument shuts Sari up.
- And Here He Comes Now: As the two children see that an unconscious Ben is in the tomb, Gabe wonders where the mummy that was in said tomb went, and Sari is unable to tell. That is when the being comes around lurking towards them.
- Bait-and-Switch: When Ben's team breaks the second seal into Prince Khor-Ru's tomb, he looks into the chamber and says they've made a big mistake... then happily adds that it's because they underestimated the value represented by the tomb, which is worth so much more than they expected.
- Bait-and-Switch Sentiment:
- Big Honking Traffic Jam: As Gabe is riding with his family through downtown Cairo from his arrival to the city, traffic was crawling on the narrow street, with horns constantly honking, and drivers keeping them going whether they moved or stopped. Gabe thought the noise was deafening.
- Brick Joke: As he is narrating in the beginning of the book, Gabe mentions how his cousin Sari is so competitive towards him whenever they are together, she could turn breakfast between them into a contest. And the morning after he arrives in Egypt, he and she are having cereal, and she tells him that she has more raisins than he did. Gabe lampshades this, telling the reader that he told us she could do this.
- Chekhov's Gun: Once again, Ben's mummy hand is key to victory, though it's integrated somewhat better into the story.
- Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: This book has an explicitly supernatural antagonist, while the previous installment just had an amoral human.
- Crystal Prison: Gabe receives an amber pendant holding a scarab. Inverted with Nila's identical pendant, which is empty. Except at night, when she turns into a scarab and crawls inside in order to keep herself alive. She ends up being reverted to a scarab when Khor-Ru destroys her pendant.
- Department of Redundancy Department: When he is announcing to Gabe and Sari at breakfast about the discovery that he and his team are making, regarding whether they will make a historic find or not, Ben has this to say:Ben: I want you to be there today. Perhaps we will make history today. Perhaps it will be a day you will want to remember for the rest of your lives. (shrugs, adds thoughtfully) Perhaps.
- Detectives Follow Footprints:
- Failed a Spot Check: After being pranked by an actor who was employed by Ben, who dressed up as a mummy to scare him, Gabe asks himself why he didn't notice that he was wearing a wristwatch between his bandages.
- Foreign-Language Tirade: An annoyed Arab does this with Gabe when he unintentionally annoys him at the airport. Gabe notes that he was glad he couldn't understand him.
- For Science!: This trope is debated over. When Dr. Fielding is confronting Ben over breaking into the tomb of an ancient prince, the latter replies that he is a scientist, and that he cannot allow superstition to stand in the way of discovery. The former counters this by saying that he is also a scientist, but he is not willing to use his experience to plunder into a sacred catacomb and descrate the dead. Dr. Fielding is the one who turns out to be correct in this case.
- Horrible Judge of Character: One would think Ben would be wary after trusting Ahmed, but nope, he totally trusts the mysterious Nila. Yet, he does not do the same for Dr. Fielding, who warns him about the dangerous risks of breaking into tombs of Egypt. This judgment of his goes disastrously wrong.
- If I Do Not Return: As he is opening the door to the mummy's tomb, Ben announces to everyone else present that if he isn't back in twenty minutes, then go tell Dr. Fielding he was right. Although Ben does actually return alive, he is nearly lured and mistaken for dead there, and this means that Dr. Fielding actually was right.
- Incoming Ham: As Ben and his team are about to break open a sealed door to enter an ancient tomb that has been sealed away, a booming voice rings out, "PLEASE - LET ME REST IN PEACE!" The voice came from behind them, and it was Dr. Fielding, warning them not to disturb the grave of an Egyptian prince by echoing his words.
- I've Come Too Far: A worker in Ben's crew brings this trope up in defense of continuing forth with the excavation, claiming that he and the team have worked so hard, and they cannot stop here and therefore have no choice, and they have to open that door. At this notion, Ben smiles and says that he agrees, and they decided to continue working.
- Leave No Witnesses: Nila says this to Gabe and Sari when planning on having them killed for seeing her waken the mummy back. However, the mummy itself stops her before it can happen, and the two kids survive.
- Mistaken Identity: Occurs when Gabe is at the airport in Egypt, looking for his uncle Ben, when a large man approaches him. He asks him, in broken English, if he is looking for an American taxi ride. The man in question was wearing a burnoose, so Gabe could not see his face. However, Gabe mistakes this man for his uncle, gives him. He then thought that his burnoose was a stupid disguise, and pulls back the hood. That's when he realized that this man was definitely not his uncle. The man became furious and shouted at Gabe in Arabic, to which he gave him a hasty apology, and that's when he actually meets Ben.
- Mummy: Naturally. The group's goal is to find a dead one, but he ends up coming back to life. Which he isn't happy about.
- Pseudo-Crisis: Chapter 3 ends with a mummy walking out of the pyramid, staggering towards Gabe, his uncle and cousin. The start of the next chapter reveals it's just one of Ben's friends, who'd been shooting a commercial for Sticky Bird Bandages at the pyramid that day and agreed to hang around and help Ben play a little prank on Gabe and Sari.
- Red Herring: Turns out Dr. Fielding is on the level. It's Nila who is the villain.
- Scrabble Babble: Happens as Gabe and Sari pass time by playing plenty of rounds of the titular game. He notes that playing this with her was no fun at all, as she was quite a defensive player and spent hours trying to figure out ways to clog the board and block him from getting any good words. And whenever he did put down a new word, she claimed it wasn't real and wasn't allowed. And since they didn't have a dictionary, she won most of the arguments.
- Series Continuity Error: The events of the first book are constantly said to have happened last summer, when it actually took place over Christmas vacation. This was fixed in the Goosebumps Classics reprint. Additionally, Gabe claims he is older than Sari when the previous book said she was two months older. This one wasn't fixed.
- Sexy Stewardess: Nancy, the stewardess on the plane that Gabe is riding on to get to Egypt, which happens at the beginning of the book. She has pretty blonde hair, kept tilting her head to one side when she talked, and was quite nice to him all throughout the voyage. Gabe notes how he liked her a lot, as she was constantly looking out for him throughout the flight because this was his first time flying alone on an airliner. Additionally, Nancy treated him more like a grown up, and kept slipping him extra bags of peanuts despite the fact that she wasn't supposed to.
- Spider Swarm: Gabe is exploring inside a pyramid only to fall into a hole that is covered with little white spiders. He is quite freaked out. It takes Sari, Ben, and Nila above him to slide down a rope and pull him out. He then has to shake the spiders off of him, which the others find funny as they watch him do it.
- Tears of Joy: Ben has these when he is celebrating his victorious attempt at finding the room full of antique artifacts in the pyramid. Nilla herself gets these as well when she gazes upon the opened tomb of Prince Khor-Ru, which turn out to be because she has finally found her relative that she has been searching for to awaken.
- Tempting Fate: Gabe, after getting pranked by Ben along with Sari and an actor dressed up as a mummy, angrily tells him that he's never falling for one of his dumb pranks again. Immediately after this, he is shown the scarab frozen in amber by Ben, and then Shari pretends that it was released from its' pendant and proceeds to pinch his leg, making him think the scarab bit him.
- Uncertain Doom: It's said repeatedly that the bite of a scarab is instant death. The book ends with Gabe feeling a pinch or bite from something... after it was noted that Nila's scarab form had escaped earlier. No direct sequels have been made since, leaving it up in the air as to whether he was killed or if it was Sari just playing another prank like she did earlier.
- Unwanted Revival: The book's villain seeks to revive the mummy of Prince Khor-Ru. However, the prince isn't happy at being brought back, demanding that said villain "Let me... rest in peace!", before attempting to strangle them. The same warning had earlier been found engraved on his tomb, and elsewhere in the same pyramid as well, so they can't say he didn't warn them.
- Words Do Not Make The Magic: What actually occurs with the words used to reawaken the mummy. Dr. Fielding warns Ben not to voice aloud the words that are inscribed on the tomb, or it will make the being rise. Gabe later decides to voice them aloud, but the mummy awakens quite shortly thereafter, and he believes that it did so because of what he said. But that was actually because Nilla said them as she used the mummy hand that she stole from Gabe at the moment.
