Dark Ladies : 'Conjure Wife' and 'Our Lady of Darkness'

Rating:
Summary: Eerie and unsettling---"Conjure Wife" is a horror gem.
Review: Let's cut to the chase: if you like tautly paced little terror tales loaded with atmosphere, then you should buy "Dark Ladies."

Fritz Leiber was a Grand Master of Fantasy and Terror fiction, and I pretty much grew up on the sly and cynical exploits of his Sword & Sworcery adventurers Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser. Leiber's stories seemed to my adolescent mind to be more worldly, more sophisticated, than the Conan or Tarl Cabot sagas I devoured when I was 12; Fafhrd and the Mouser were themselves street-smart and cunning, dispatching mortal and demonic foes with a style and alacrity usually lacking in other Sword & Sorcery epics.

Leiber brought that same sense of style and airiness of prose to his terror tales as well, and "Dark Ladies" is a fine example of his literary wizardry over the span of three decades: the book contains two superlative tales of sorcery and the malevolently supernatural intruding into modern life, "Conjure Wife" (written in 1943) and "Our Lady of Darkness" (1978). Both tales are linked by the thread of sorcery, to be sure, but are also reflective of Leiber's tremendous debt to both H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James: they are heavily atmospheric, pulse with ghostly malevolence, and have at their center unassuming, mild-mannered scholarly protagonists who are unwittingly and reluctantly drawn into dark adventures.

I must confess that I read "Conjure Wife" last, anticipating that it wouldn't be very interesting. It deals with Norman Saylor, a senior professor of Sociology at a small university in rural New Jersey who discovers his wife is a witch. As a rational thinker, Saylor is appalled, and orders his wife to give up her sorcery immediately; she does so, and the fun begins. From the premise, I wasn't very excited; the story seemed a little too "Bewitched" to be scary.

I'm happy to report that I was wrong, and "Conjure Wife" is one of the nastiest, most riveting, and frightening little gems of pure horror ever written. The kind of tale that has you glancing nervously at dark corners, "Conjure Wife" was a pleasure to read, though the ending came far too quickly and left me wanting more.

"Our Lady of Darkness", surprisingly, is the weaker tale of the two, though it was equally atmospheric. San Francisco horror writer Franz Westen, looking at the ragged hilltop of Corona Heights through binoculars, spies a pale, lean, brownish figure cavorting on the hill, which appears to wave at him. The next day he hikes up to the hill; finding no one there, he turns the binoculars on his apartment, two miles away; to his horror the figure appears in his own window, waving back at him!

This tale is erudite and exciting, and plunges Westen into the occult theories of Thibaut de Castries, who lived in San Francisco at the turn of the century and was at the center of a secret society of famous writers, including Jack London and Clark Ashton Smith. More interesting, the story delves into de Castries' notions of megapolisomancy, the theory that cities conjure up unhealthy and malignant energies of their own. Poor Westen has drawn the attention of such a creature, and the tale becomes a kind of scholarly cat and mouse.

Like "Conjure Wife", "Our Lady of Darkness" ends far too swiftly, and leaves the reader wanting more. I would imagine that's a fairly insignificant criticism, and it's certainly better to leave a reader wanting more than the reverse. "Our Lady of Darkness" is also a studied homage to the works of both M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft, though his tale fails to achieve the soul-curdling terror of either of those masters.

That said, if you're looking for the perfect spooky book to curl up with beside a roaring fire (preferably with a sleeping cat on the other sofa, and lightning flashing outside), then "Dark Ladies" is for you.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliantly written, horror, masterpiece.
Review: The two stories in this book despite being over forty years apart are closely linked by a common theme.

CONJURE WIFE : Being of a scientific inclination Norman Saylor is unconvinced by his wife, Tansy, that her secret conjurings are in any way pertinent to their lives within a small-town college environment, and that his success to date, has been due to his academic endeavours. So Tansy being the good wife she is, and in a moment of self doubt, disposes of her hoard of graveyard dirt, pieces of hair, scraps of metal, and dried herbs, etc. At first nothing seems to change, as Norman had insisted it wouldn't, but as Tansy had hitherto believed, the Saylors become the target of the other wives' ambitions - especially Mrs Carr's.

To begin with, Norman's moral conduct is questioned by some his colleagues in an attempt to discredit him, then the family cat, Totem, is brutally killed. But Norman, the unbeliever, ignores the get-out-of-town advice, and has his life threatened by Tansy whose soul has been taken over by the other wives.

By this time Norman begins to consider the notion of witchcraft more seriously, and applies himself to a steep learning curve in order to outsmart the other wives and so get Tansy's soul back to where it belongs.

In hindsight it seems that Norman was being used as a way to get at Tansy so that he would convince her to shed herself of her protections and so become vulnerable to the other wives' combined attack. For it turns out that they knew, though Tansy didn't, that Tansy was the most powerful of them all.

OUR LADY OF DARKNESS: Franz Westen, a writer who converts `Weird Underground' television episodes into novels, falls prey to a curse put upon another - Clark Ashton Smith - by the long dead founder of Megapolisomancy, Thibaut de Castries. This is a consequence of three chance happenings: the buying of a book in a second-hand shop inside which Thibaut de Castries has secreted the curse between lightly gummed together pages; the taking up of residence at 607 Rhodes, a room in an apartment building that had been lived in by Thibaut de Castries and frequented by Clark Ashton Smith, and concealed within the walls of which is hidden another text -`The Fifty Cipher'; and the viewing of a brown robed figure on the peak of Corona heights - a hilltop directly in front of Franz Westen's living room window.

In today's terms this is horror in the style of The Blair Witch Project. A story permeated by a sense of menacing creepiness.

Our Lady of Darkness continues one of the, forty years earlier, themes of Conjure Wife; that women are possessed of the power of witchcraft to a greater or lesser degree, so creating the linkage for this pairing. As is usual for Fritz Leiber, the writing is tremendously slick.

I really enjoyed this book, and have read it three times already.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliantly written, horror, masterpiece.
Review: The two stories in this book despite being over forty years apart are closely linked by a common theme.

CONJURE WIFE : Being of a scientific inclination Norman Saylor is unconvinced by his wife, Tansy, that her secret conjurings are in any way pertinent to their lives within a small-town college environment, and that his success to date, has been due to his academic endeavours. So Tansy being the good wife she is, and in a moment of self doubt, disposes of her hoard of graveyard dirt, pieces of hair, scraps of metal, and dried herbs, etc. At first nothing seems to change, as Norman had insisted it wouldn't, but as Tansy had hitherto believed, the Saylors become the target of the other wives' ambitions - especially Mrs Carr's.

To begin with, Norman's moral conduct is questioned by some his colleagues in an attempt to discredit him, then the family cat, Totem, is brutally killed. But Norman, the unbeliever, ignores the get-out-of-town advice, and has his life threatened by Tansy whose soul has been taken over by the other wives.

By this time Norman begins to consider the notion of witchcraft more seriously, and applies himself to a steep learning curve in order to outsmart the other wives and so get Tansy's soul back to where it belongs.

In hindsight it seems that Norman was being used as a way to get at Tansy so that he would convince her to shed herself of her protections and so become vulnerable to the other wives' combined attack. For it turns out that they knew, though Tansy didn't, that Tansy was the most powerful of them all.

OUR LADY OF DARKNESS: Franz Westen, a writer who converts 'Weird Underground' television episodes into novels, falls prey to a curse put upon another - Clark Ashton Smith - by the long dead founder of Megapolisomancy, Thibaut de Castries. This is a consequence of three chance happenings: the buying of a book in a second-hand shop inside which Thibaut de Castries has secreted the curse between lightly gummed together pages; the taking up of residence at 607 Rhodes, a room in an apartment building that had been lived in by Thibaut de Castries and frequented by Clark Ashton Smith, and concealed within the walls of which is hidden another text -'The Fifty Cipher'; and the viewing of a brown robed figure on the peak of Corona heights - a hilltop directly in front of Franz Westen's living room window.

In today's terms this is horror in the style of The Blair Witch Project. A story permeated by a sense of menacing creepiness.

Our Lady of Darkness continues one of the, forty years earlier, themes of Conjure Wife; that women are possessed of the power of witchcraft to a greater or lesser degree, so creating the linkage for this pairing. As is usual for Fritz Leiber, the writing is tremendously slick.

I really enjoyed this book, and have read it three times already.