PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

In 1922, Lord Earl Carnarvon financed the Egyptian expedition that unearthed King Tut's tomb. While the fact that the dig gained a reputation for being "cursed" is well known, Mathias Fowler slipped away into anonymity. Fowler, an American on the team, had grown obsessed with the Ancient Egyptians and when he returned to the States it was with several stolen artifacts in tow. Fowler had become so consumed by the era that when he died, he killed all of his household staff and had them buried in his mansion with him - a modern day Pharaoh's Tomb. Almost 60 years after Fowler's death, Jessica Parrish, archeologist and would-be-Indiana Jones, has been hired to assemble and lead a team into the house to take back the missing pieces and disable the booby traps that have already cost one unfortunate group their lives. Can Parrish and her comrades navigate the elaborate deathtraps with their persons intact or will the curse of Tut's tomb just add to its mounting body count?

(preview | official The Tomb website)


AUTHORS' COMMENTS:

[Christina] Jessica Parrish is very near and dear to my heart. Both Nunzio and I play role-playing games. (He introduced me to gaming around the same time he introduced me to comics, so I just became a big geek all in one fell swoop!) Jessica Parrish was a character I created for one of our games. She was meant to be a swash-buckling Indiana Jones type who was sassy and sarcastic and a bit self-destructive. Max Kelleher was actually also a character that Nunzio created for that same game. And when our game ended, we found we missed the characters very much. So we decided that we wanted to write about the adventures of Jessie & Max! We keep hoping that some day we'll be able to tell more stories with them. But see? I'm not a geek. I just game as research for writing. Yeah, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

[Nunzio] This is the kind of story that drives our manager nuts. Christina and I have a tendency to try to mix up genres - a lot. One of our first feature scripts was a Private Investigator story - but it was a hard boiled female P.I. in the middle of an off-the-wall romantic comedy. People always wanted to know where the dead body was. Our manager wanted us to stop mixing genres and just pick one. So, then, for Oni, we write an Indiana Jones story... set in a haunted house. She hates when we do that. It's not that she doesn't get the advantages of hybridizing. But Hollywood wants to pigeonhole writers: "Oh, they do romantic comedy" or "he's a horror guy." When you hybridize, they don't know what genre to categorize you in, and worse, they don't know what genre to market the film as. We get why it's a problem. But we're not likely to ever stop doing it. Sorry, Angela.