FORGOTTEN BOOKS #203: CONJURE WIFE/OUR LADY OF DARKNESS By Fritz Leiber

Back in 1991, TOR Books published an omnibus volume containing Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife and Our Lady of Darkness. Leiber’s premise is that all women are witches with magic powers. Reading these two novels about dark forces and secret occult warfare that permeates our contemporary world is an astonishing experience. Leiber work always contains surprises and originality. This wonderful volume proves this on every page. Conjure Wife was first published in 1943, but reads like it was written yesterday. Our Lady of Darkness was first published in 1978. You can find copies of this bargain TOR edition online at reasonable prices, but you can also find Conjure Wife and Our Lady of Darkness published separately in a variety of editions depending on your tastes and the size of your wallet. Don’t miss these Leiber classics!

20 thoughts on “FORGOTTEN BOOKS #203: CONJURE WIFE/OUR LADY OF DARKNESS By Fritz Leiber

  1. Richard R.

    Wow, FFB up early! What a treat! I have read Conjure Wife but not Our Lady of Darkness. I like Leiber so I should try to get to it one of these days, as I have a paperback of it somewhere here.

    Reply
    1. george Post author

      Diane and I are going to see LES MIZ tomorrow, Rick. It’s nearly a 3-hour movie so I won’t be around much of the day to respond to comments so I figured I’d put up my FFB early so I could response to some of the comments. See…it’s working!

      Reply
  2. Todd Mason

    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. (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. Merritt novel. I haven’t seen the latter-day spoof version, despite the presence of Teri Garr as female lead. 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. That ALONE first saw book publication in disguise as a porn novel is just sad (Ejler Jakobsson inserted some heavy-breathing passages for the Beacon edition, as THE SINFUL ONES), if not quite as funny on the face of it as CONJURE WIFE later being reprinted by Beacon’s successor Award Books as a Gothic, in the supermarket/DARK SHADOWS-era sense…nor quite as annoying, as Harlan Ellison noted years ago, as how Doubleday treated DARKNESS in its first edition, as just another knockoff in the “science fiction” line (it’s not remotely sf…) and, as Algis Budrys ended his review of DARKNESS, “Where is Leiber’s National Book Award? Where is his Pulitzer?”

    Reply
    1. george Post author

      I totally agree, Todd! Where is the LIBRARY OF AMERICA Fritz Leiber volumes??? If LOA can put out volumes on H.P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick, why not Leiber? Leiber specialized in strong women characters in his fiction.

      Reply
  3. Steve Oerkfitz

    I just dug up my copy of Dark Ladies and and have started Our Lady of Darkness. I don’t remember having read this before at full length, altho I read the shorter version that ran in F&SF in 1977 called The Pale Brown Thing.
    Hope you enjoyed Les Miz better than I did. Looked good but 3 hours of very boring music-mainly for the Andrew Weber crowd of which I’m not.

    Reply
    1. george Post author

      I survived the nearly three hours of LES MIZ, Steve. As I mentioned, I saw the play version four times so I was familiar with the story and the music (I also read the unabridged novel). Singers make music compelling and several of the movie cast members struggled with singing and acting at the same time. Russell Crowe struggled. So did Amanda Seyfried. I thought Hugh Jackman did well, but was singing an octave too high. The biggest surprise for me was Samantha Barks, in her film debut, who plays Éponine. I thought she was terrific! My full review of LES MIZ will be posted to this blog next week.

      Reply
  4. Carl V.

    I’ve really enjoyed the Fafhrd books that I’ve read. I believe I have a copy of Conjure Wife downstairs on the shelves.

    Looking forward to your review of Les Miz. I liked it quite a lot. Not nearly as much as the times I’ve seen it on the stage, but I thought they did a good job capturing the emotion.

    Reply

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