Our Lady of Darkness

Sometime during a three-year drunk in San Francisco, Franz Westen, a pulp author, bought two strange books. One was Megapolisomancy—a “science of cities”—by the black magician and socialite Thibaut de Castries; the other an early journal of Clark Ashton Smith, a writer of horror stories. As Westen tries to piece his life together, these books draw him to the ashes of a wealthy, brilliant and degenerate bohemian cult, and to a grotesque living world of technological curses.

One morning, while examining the city through binoculars, Franz glimpses a priest-like dancing figure on a desolate hill. Fascinated and vaguely horrified, he investigates. The hill is deserted but now he sees the faceless spectre across the city, in his own apartment! Paranoia creeps over Franz; he knows intuitively that he has been selected by this entity. Somehow he must break its hold over him. His two eerie books have the answers.

In Megapolisomancy Franz discovers an occult science of vicious demons—“paramental entities”—who are intimately related to urban design and engineering. And in the diary of Smith, a disciple of Thibaut de Castries, Franz sees the personalities of the sorcerer and his circle. He goes back to the San Francisco of the 1900s and the Dionysian members of the Bohemian Club—Jack London, the poets George Sterling and Nora May French, Earl Rogers, Gertrude Atherton, Ambrose Bierce. For a brief, heady time, de Castries used these people in his paramental experiments.

Hounded through the city by ravenous ghosts and at the end of his wits, Franz finally confronts his curse, the embodiment of the paramental force: Our Lady of Darkness.

Fritz Leiber has written a subtle and elegant book. His realm is the arcane point where technology and mystery, science and horror, meet. Our Lady of Darkness is a terrifying and ethereal work of science fiction.