Brood of the Witch Queen - Softcover

A dead civilization. A forbidden book. A young man who should not exist.

When Robert Cairn crosses paths with the elegant and unsettling Antony Ferrara, he is drawn into a mystery that stretches from fashionable London drawing rooms to the tombs and pyramids of Egypt.

Where Ferrara goes, impossible things follow.

A man dies under circumstances no doctor can explain. Pale hands appear where no living body stands. Ancient rings turn up in modern places. Strange incense drifts through locked rooms. Women fall under inexplicable spells. And always, just beyond reach, is the suggestion of something far older than Ferrara himself-something that should have vanished with the priests and sorcerers of ancient Egypt.

Robert's father, Dr. Bruce Cairn, knows that the danger is real. Years earlier, while excavating in Egypt, he helped uncover secrets never meant to survive into the modern world: forbidden rites, the legendary Book of Thoth, and traces of a lost cult devoted to a beautiful and terrifying Witch-Queen whose name was deliberately erased from history.

Now those secrets have followed him home.

As the Cairns pursue Ferrara from London to Cairo and deep into the ancient world, the mystery erupts into a nightmare of vampiric possession, enchanted artifacts, secret chambers, murderous orchids, swarms of spiders, supernatural assassins, and rituals capable of reaching across thousands of years.

And at the center of it all stands Antony Ferrara.

But who-or what-is he?

First published in 1918, Sax Rohmer's Brood of the Witch-Queen is a headlong supernatural adventure filled with archaeological mystery, black magic, exotic danger, and the seductive menace of forbidden knowledge. Long before cinematic adventurers began raiding lost tombs, Rohmer was already sending modern heroes into a world where ancient curses were real, forgotten gods still cast shadows, and opening the wrong door could unleash something that had been waiting for centuries.

This new edition preserves Rohmer's original period language while presenting the novel with new chapter-opening illustrations and editorial material exploring its historical setting and sometimes startling Edwardian worldview.

For readers who love lost tombs, cursed artifacts, occult conspiracies, Gothic mysteries, vintage pulp adventure, and supernatural tales of ancient Egypt, Brood of the Witch-Queen is a wild descent into a world where archaeology can uncover far more than the dead.


As mentioned, the book was originally written in 1918 and, aside from mild editing to clean up typos in the edition we found, remains largely unchanged. Trigger alert: The editors of this book are in no way trying to pretend it was written yesterday; there are bits of dialogue and some words which some people might find offensive. We felt it was important for context to leave the language as is.

In addition, we used generative AI to create the art that appears at the start of each chapter. We did this to enhance the reader's experience. We redrew the cover in Photoshop, and it comes from one of the earliest editions we could find online.