The Scorpion King

The Scorpion King is Max Allan Collins’s 2002 novelization of the Universal Pictures prequel spinoff of The Mummy Returns. Set in 3,000 BC Akkad, the novel follows Mathayus, the last of the Akkadian assassins, hired to kill the sorceress who serves the warlord Memnon. He kidnaps her instead, which makes the plot. Collins works from Stephen Sommers’s screenplay but uses the prose room to do the Akkadian-cultural and weapons-handling research the film cannot show.

Collins’s novelizations are reliably better than they need to be, and The Scorpion King is no exception. The opening assassin-clan section is sharper than the film’s; Mathayus’s desert-survival sequences (the scorpion-eating set piece that gives the franchise its name, the Bedouin tribe encounter, the Memnon-palace infiltration) are tightened up by being on the page rather than the screen. The dialogue, lifted from the screenplay, fights the prose register a bit. The romance subplot is film-shaped and translates well.

Recommended for fans of the Mummy / Scorpion King franchise who want the expanded version, and for readers looking for books like The Scorpion King in the sword-and-sandal novelization tradition (the Conan tie-ins are useful cousins). Three stars and a fast, competent read.