63 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
That's one brooding witch queen!, August 28, 2006
Sax Rohmer is one of my guilty pleasures. He may not be politically correct, but he really knew how to pack atmosphere and suspense into what were essentially written movie serials. The Fu Manchu stories are great fun, but his absolute best is 'Witch Queen'. A friend told me years ago that this was the scariest book he had ever read and I have to agree with him. This is easily the eeriest book I have ever read. And when the characters start crawling around in the pyramid of Meydum...well! The claustrophgobia goes up by a factor of ten. If you want a great scary read (and want to know where the inspiration for Indiana Jones probably came from) please, don't be put off by what may sound like a silly title - buy the book, put your feet up and scare yourself senseless!
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Period Occult Fiction, Inspiration for Indiana Jones., November 4, 2007
"It was a bat, a fairly large one and a clot of blood marked the place where its head had been."
The most gripping adventure story I've read in some time. More thrilling than the Indiana Jones movies; If Spielberg hasn't carefully studied this, he should! I especially liked the circa 1918 view of the occult sciences, and their practitioners. Rohmer creates a consistent and creepy supernatural world.
Rohmer's works are mysteriously absent from my entire county library system, but are thankfully back in print.
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44 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
These reviews are associated with a different imprint of this book, July 8, 2010
Sax Rohmer's books are great, and Brood of the Witch Queen is no exception. Loved these when I was a kid. However, when you're buying, check the edition and publisher carefully. The version of "Brood of the Witch Queen" published by General Books LLC is a poor quality, automated reproduction with no index, no illustrations and quite a number of typos.
To quote a few specifics from the publishers web site:
"We created your book using OCR software that includes an automated spell check. Our OCR software is 99 percent accurate if the book is in good condition. However, with up to 3,500 characters per page, even one percent can be an annoying number of typos....
After we re-typeset and designed your book, the page numbers change so the old index and table of contents no longer work. Therefore, we usually remove them. Since many of our books only sell a couple of copies, manually creating a new index and table of contents could add more than a hundred dollars to the cover price....
Our OCR software can't distinguish between an illustration and a smudge or library stamp so it ignores everything except type. We would really like to manually scan and add the illustrations. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies....
We created your book using a robot who turned and photographed each page. Our robot is 99 percent accurate. But sometimes two pages stick together. And sometimes a page may even be missing from our copy of the book. We would really like to manually scan each page and buy multiple copies of each original. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies....."
The owners of General Books LLC, VDM Publishing, are flooding Amazon with these low quality publications (450,000 listed under General Books LLC) and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews associated with the original or with better quality imprints associated with them. While the price is at least reasonable, the product description is totally misleading for the buyer that's not aware of this publisher.
IMHO this is unethical marketing.
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