Huge amounts of steel and concrete and electricity are lined up in complex geometrical patterns, and then crammed full of living beings like vertical coffins filled with the buried-alive. It's MEGAPOLISAMANCY ('telling the future through big cities'), evidently written around 1900 by a sinister magician-revolutionary type named Thibaut de Castrie (a contemporary and rival of Alistair Cooke Crowley).ĭe Castrie's notion was that mankind was stirring up vast elemental forces by building cities. The problems seem to start when he comes across a book he had purchased secondhand years earlier. Franz makes a living doing novelizations of the TV series WEIRD UNDERGROUND ('secondary creativity on his part at best') as well as some original work. He's now living in San Francisco, in the same building as a few good friends and a quasi-romantic interest, the classical musician Cal (short for Calpurnia). We're following Franz Westen, a recovering alcoholic who lost his wife to brain cancer a few years earlier. (As a further side benefit, you get a haunting field trip through San Francisco as seen in shadows.)

James and even has a young Chinese woman quoting passages from Sax Rohmer in a mocking way. As well, Leiber adds references to Dashiel Hammett and M.R. The effective Lovecrafian technique of weaving real historical people like Jack London, Clark Ashton Smith, Ambrose Bierce and Lovecraft himself into the story works well as always (there's even an audacious mention of a story by 'Leiber') and genuine books you could find in a big city library are mingled with the usual suggestive made-up titles. There are obviously heavy doses of Leiber autobiography here, beginning with the fact that the haunted building is the same as where he actually lived.

OUR LADY OF DARKNESS first appeared in 1977, in a shorter form as 'The Pale Brown Thing,' in THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION. but getting there was an astounding trip. True, the ending did seem a bit of a letdown the final materialization was more bizarre than convincing and its dismissal was rather too easy (that incantation was just ludicrous). OUR LADY OF DARKNESS has several moments that gave me that delicious cold jolt, several original concepts and carefully worked out theories, and some of Fritz Leiber's quirkiest writing. I was surprised and pleased, as it's been too long since I found a story that had this effect. This book pretty much seized me by the shirt front, yanked me in and wouldn't let me go.

Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber