249" is a Gothic horror short story by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle, first published in Harper's Magazine in 1892.

The story tells of a University of Oxford athlete named Abercrombie Smith who notices a strange series of events surrounding Edward Bellingham, an Egyptology student who owns many ancient Egyptian artefacts, including a mummy.

The story has been widely anthologised and received positive reviews from critics, including praise from authors H. P. Lovecraft and Anne Rice.

Critics have compared the story to the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and H. Rider Haggard and interpreted it as containing themes of imperialism and masculinity.

Shortly afterwards, a student called Long Norton, against whom Bellingham bears a long-standing grudge, is violently attacked by a mysterious and seemingly inhuman figure.

[1] In his Horror Literature through History: An Encyclopedia of the Stories that Speak to Our Deepest Fears: Volume 1, Matt Cardin contextualises "Lot No.

[2] In the early 1880s, the mummy of Ramses II, widely believed to be the Pharaoh of the Exodus, was discovered, and the British occupied Egypt with their military.

These two events sparked a late Victorian era "fascination with the Egyptian undead," popularised by H. Rider Haggard's novel Cleopatra (1889).

[3] The story was first published in Harper's Magazine in September 1892[5] and was included in Doyle's medical-themed anthology Round the Red Lamp (1894).

This fear, captured in Max Nordau's influential book Degeneration (1892), was aided by the fact that Britain faced economic threats from Europe and the United States.

In Blasted Literature, he writes that "The story calls into question to what extent colonialism, with its absorption of the cultures of the colonised, destabilises the perspective of the imperial, metropolitan subject position.

[11] In Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature 1870–1914, Bradley Deane writes that the mummy from "Lot No.

[12] Deane opines that some earlier works of British popular literature, like She, characterised the British as masculine and their enemies as feminine; he feels that Doyle subverted this expectation by making the mummy a "male, mindless but strong and swift [figure] who threatens to defeat a young Oxford athlete in a terrifying footrace."

Deane argues that the lack of a masculine/feminine distinction between Smith and the mummy "suggests a darker fragmentation of identity and an emasculating reversal of the imperial hierarchy.

[14] In his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927), H. P. Lovecraft writes that: "Doyle now and then struck a powerfully spectral note, as in 'The Captain of the Pole-Star', a tale of arctic ghostliness, and 'Lot No.

[5] Andrew Barger said that In a mixed review, Richard Bleiler praises the tale's "narrative vigor" and "brisk" pace.

[20] According to Mark Browning's Stephen King on the Big Screen, the "mummy horror sub-genre" was "largely played out" by the time the film was made.

[7] Emily Adler notes that Doyle's story pre-dates Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and Richard Marsh's The Beetle (1897) in its portrayal of foreign monsters invading Britain.

[9] McGregor identifies the short story as a significant influence on other mummy-related media, such as Stoker's novel The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) and the Boris Karloff film The Mummy (1932), as well as zombie fiction.