The Pixies: Ancient Egypt

I'm fascinated by Ancient Egypt. As a kid at school we learned about the pharaohs and that stuff was incredible -- it was basically the only time as a kid that we got exposed to violence, barred from scary movies. We understood violence through history. Our British history was bad enough, Empire, The Tudors, etc, but Ancient Egyptian society seemed weirdly close to our own with its reverence of royalty. Only in 2022 (when this book was long in the past) did I realize our Queen was similar to a pharaoh.

The anarchic and morbid chaos of Ancient Egypt, a society obsessed with death, seemed the perfect match for The Pixies. Everyone talks about how the book is this tribute to Germany or whatever but it's not -- the point is that when Gunther and his cronies open up the pixies, they are reviving an ancient regal evil that can terrorise and destroy. There's an unsettling similarity, also, to Nazi Germany with the persecution that occurred in Egypt of the Jews. The evil of Pharaoh, and his refusal to free the slaves, is something Gunther hearkens back to when he releases these wicked creatures inside the castle.