A jointly-authored third novel in this series, Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris, was released on February 1, 2022, two months after Anne Rice's death.

Although the marriage is a standard alliance between the wealthy Stratfords and an impoverished family of nobles, Alex truly loves Julie, though she is unable to return these feelings.

Ramses quickly adopts a pseudonym, "Reginald Ramsey", and claims to be an Egyptologist to throw off the accusation made by the frightened Henry that a "bloody mummy" rose from the crypt to harm him.

Although he served as Cleopatra's counsel (and encouraged her to romance Julius Caesar in a bid to keep the country independent), he had also fallen in love with her, and had revealed to her the secrets of the elixir.

Although Ramses appears to be coming to terms with his past, upon visiting the Cairo Museum, he unexpectedly recognizes an unidentified mummy as being that of Cleopatra.

Cleopatra is revived, but by Ramses not pouring the entire vial of elixir on her, the restoration is incomplete; she is a half-formed monstrosity, awake and conscious yet with parts of her face, hands, and torso still gone.

Her incomplete brain restoration leaves her not totally coherent; though Ramses later repairs her body with more of the potion, she appears to be insane and kills a number of people, including Henry.

In an attempt to escape Ramses, Cleopatra "dies" when her car is hit by a train and is consumed by a fiery explosion so hot that it "could kill even an immortal".

Having once tested it upon livestock and crops in his own time, he had been horrified to find that such things transformed by the elixir cannot be digested and continually regenerate even inside the intestines, with bloody and gruesome results.

And once this elixir is used, it cannot be undone and should it be poured into a fire, it would become dust that could then be swept by rain into the rivers or the oceans, creating immortal fish and sea creatures, or watering plants to become invulnerable.

Rice credited the authors of several turn of the century mummy stories with her inspiration, including Arthur Conan Doyle ("Lot No.

"[2] England during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries fell under a fad for Ancient Egypt, a phenomenon also known as Egyptomania which produced many works of fiction from which Rice could draw.

Missing a ripe opportunity to skewer 20th-century values and sexual mores, [Rice], ever-fascinated with the undead, avoids character and plot development, larding largely lifeless, sloppy prose with a surfeit of epiphanies and calamities.

"[5] During a 2014 interview, Rice stated that she had delved back into the fictional universe established in The Mummy and that there was a strong possibility she could pen a sequel.

[7][9] A jointly-authored third novel in this series, Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris, was released on February 1, 2022,[10] two months after Anne Rice's death.