A classic story of supernatural horror about a mysterious ancient Egyptian entity which seeks revenge upon a British Member of Parliament in London and wreaks havoc with its powers of hypnosis and shape-shifting, Marsh’s novel is a sensational turn-of-the-century fiction, similar to Stoker’s Dracula, George du Maurier’s Trilby, and Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels. It is narrated from the perspectives of multiple characters, a technique used to create suspense in many of the "sensation novels" pioneered by Wilkie Collins and others in the 1860s, as well as in many late nineteenth-century novels such as Dracula. Richard Marsh was the pseudonym of the British author, Richard Bernard Heldmann.