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"Our Lady Of Darkness" by Fritz Leiber
Mar. 2nd, 2007 02:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joysilenceI was recently lucky enough to bag a Fritz Leiber paperback from Purple Books (via Abebooks) - Our Lady Of Darkness. It's a strange tale (even by the standards of the genre) about a widower and recovering alcoholic, Franz Westen, who comes upon two odd books in a second-hand dealer's. One is a weird blend of the occult and science titled Megapolisomancy: A New Science Of Cities, written by a malevolent eccentric Thibaut de Castries, and the other appears to be an account of de Castries' bizarre practises and worsening temper, handwritten by no less a person than Clark Ashton Smith! Trying to soothe his mind after the tragic death of his wife Daisy, Franz dives into the works, only to find himself increasingly distracted by the antics of an indistinct creature atop Corona Heights, a hill he surveys from his San Francisco flat. He pops over to the Heights to investigate, which is when the trouble starts!
I think this is a pretty amazing book. The sheer diversity of the subject matter sets it apart from pretty much any other work in the genre that I've ever read. The imaginary topic of megapolisomancy is fascinating by itself - it's a cryptic 'neoPythagorean' science by which are measured and predicted the evil effects of the cities that cover the modern world in an 'electro-mephitic city-stuff' and seek to stamp out life, first on this planet ,then through the whole universe! But Leiber also weaves in a good deal about the benign power of music, its relation to mathematics, the curious cults and personalities of the 20s San Fran intelligentsia (which suffered from a peculiarly high suicide rate, for reasons which are explored in the book) and, perhaps most interestingly of all, the 'secret spaces' in old buildings 'that weren't really hidden but were never noticed'. The book's a Fortean paradise! (For a taste of the thematic scope, you just need to look at this set of annotations...)
( Read more... )
I'd also be interested to hear your views on Conjure Wife if any of you have read it :)
I think this is a pretty amazing book. The sheer diversity of the subject matter sets it apart from pretty much any other work in the genre that I've ever read. The imaginary topic of megapolisomancy is fascinating by itself - it's a cryptic 'neoPythagorean' science by which are measured and predicted the evil effects of the cities that cover the modern world in an 'electro-mephitic city-stuff' and seek to stamp out life, first on this planet ,then through the whole universe! But Leiber also weaves in a good deal about the benign power of music, its relation to mathematics, the curious cults and personalities of the 20s San Fran intelligentsia (which suffered from a peculiarly high suicide rate, for reasons which are explored in the book) and, perhaps most interestingly of all, the 'secret spaces' in old buildings 'that weren't really hidden but were never noticed'. The book's a Fortean paradise! (For a taste of the thematic scope, you just need to look at this set of annotations...)
( Read more... )
I'd also be interested to hear your views on Conjure Wife if any of you have read it :)
