Our Lady of Darkness introduces San Francisco horror writer Franz Westen. One of his best novels is the classic dark fantasy Our Lady of Darkness, winner of the 1978 World Fantasy Award. His fiction won the Hugo, Nebula, Derleth, Gandalf, Lovecraft, and World Fantasy Awards, and he was honored with the Life Achievement Lovecraft Award and the Grand Master Nebula Award. Synopsis: A horror author is drawn into a mysterious curse in this World Fantasy Award–winning novel from the author of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series.įritz Leiber may be best known as a fantasy writer, but he published widely and successfully in the horror and science fiction fields. OUR LADY OF DARKNESS is more of a tale of a very odd sort of haunting…this omnibus is much to be preferred to the smarmily retitled DARK LADIES (same content), but someone really should produce a volume including CONJURE, his first novel (published alongside the serial GATHER, DARKNESS! in UNKOWN’s companion magazine ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION) and DARKNESS, his last, with the near-mid-career short novel YOU’RE ALL ALONE…which Leiber had originally written with hopes of publishing in UNKNOWN, which folded before he could place it there, and it eventually became just about the best thing FANTASTIC ADVENTURES published, in 1950, when Howard Browne was editing and not averse to publishing good to important work by the likes of Sturgeon and Bloch.Publisher: Currently Open Road Media Sci-Fi and Fantasy I haven’t seen the latter-day spoof version, despite the presence of Teri Garr as female lead. (Saylor pops up again in “Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee,” a very funny and otherwise unrelated fantasy whose title didn’t register with me, in its potential reading as a mildly randy joke, for decades.) Leiber was perhaps the greatest male pro-feminist in fantasy, particularly in 1943, when CONJURE was published in one issue of UNKNOWN WORLDS, the great fantasy magazine, and the novel was ineptly, loosely filmed as WEIRD WOMAN not long after and rather more faithfully and competently (if not with the same power as the novel) as NIGHT OF THE EAGLE in Britain (with a script by Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson and George Baxt) imported as BURN, WITCH, BURN! despite no relevance to the A. Well, that’s the premise of CONJURE WIFE…that essentially all women have to be witches, for self-preservation and protection of those in their lives, including such condescending husbands as Norman Saylor…who loses the ‘tude as he Learns Better.

Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber