Are you my Mummy?

So, in order to break up the blue vampires of Savannah series, I reached back on my shelves to find the Year of the Scarab Trilogy by Andrew Bates, Heralds of the Storm being the first.

Anyway, to give some background here, since this was really an odd series from White Wolf at the time...

Not long after they released Hunter: the Gathering (a table top Role Playing Game wherein characters are normal humans who suddenly get imbued and realize their are actual monsters all around them) during the Year of the Reckoning, they started a year themed Year of the Scarab, wherein most of the released materials had to do with Egyptian settings, characters, etc. The capper was of course Mummy: the Resurrection, a retake on previous books concerning mummies.

Anyway, this particular trilogy concerns mummies and their interactions with other denizens of the World of Darkness, particularly Hunters and the Risen (ghosts returned from the Shadowlands inhabiting bodies.)

As such, we meet Thea, an Egyptian American hunter who's mother works for Pentex through subsidiaries. Thea is a Hunter, working with a group of other Hunters on the North Side of Chicago. When we start, said group is busy stalking a vampire on his estate. Unfortunately, as we find out, someone else is working with them without their knowledge. That would be Dennis "Carpenter" Maxwell, a gangster who has come back from the dead to exert his revenge on the family that killed him. Problem being one of the grandchildren whom Carpenter had tried to take care of took a fatal wound but survived. (Yay! Mummies!)

Sadly, when the book ends, readers are aware that Nickolas Sforza is something, but not what. Nor do the Hunters, nor does Carpenter.

Instead, the reader has suffered through watching Hunters die, fight, and generally bicker; watched Carpenter extract revenge on the vampire that killed him in the 20's, and met Sforza, who kind of sounds like someone adopting traditions that don't belong to him.

It's readable, but it's also kind of silly and there were other fictions being released around this time that explored similar dynamics within the setting.