Customer Reviews

Our Lady of Darkness

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Leiber takes a stab at modernizing the H.P.Lovecraft school of horror in this peculiar novel of mid-twentieth century San Francisco. The story revolves around one Franz Westen, recovering alcoholic and horror writer, whose fascination with the steep, solitary hill called Corona Heights leads him into the creepy world of Thibault de Castries, an eccentric mystic. Anarchist, founder of a secret order, and theorizer of the dreaded paramental entities, de Castries' power has touched the lives of many of San Francisco's most illustrious citizens. Can Franz somehow keep from being drawn into its tantalizing maw?

Leiber does an excellent job of migrating Lovecraft's growing disquiet to mid-twentieth century urban angst, theorizing the existence of dark forces that draw their power from the mass aggregations of metal, electricity and lost humanity that compose our great cities. Still, it's difficult to keep an air of suspense for any great length of time, and much of this book is just a slow buildup without very much tension. Leiber has too much good material here for a short story, but as it stands, the novel could have been cut by 50 pages or more without much loss. For example, the protagonist's friends Gunnar and Saul, who appear in so many scenes, don't do anything and really have no function, while the romantic interest, the intellectual Calpurnia, is usually absent despite the critical role she plays.

If you're a big fan of Lovecraft, give this review an extra star - you'll really enjoy Leiber's new take on some classic themes. Add another if you're really into San Francisco's geography and/or literary history, because this book has lots of both. So if you find that you fit the fairly narrow target audience this book seems to have been written for, you'll probably love this novel. This reviewer didn't.

I'm not sure what those who slight this book were looking for - maybe Stephen King horror/populism or Clive Barker fashionable extremisim. It certainly isn't any of those. What it is is literate, atmospheric, intricate, subtle, slyly humorous, and character-driven. It's well worth a read.

I really disagree with the reviews written about this book, for multiple reasons.

While this book does have a philisophical bent, it is more musings on the nature of insanity and reality and the possibility of cities creating their own special brand of supernatural, deemed "paramental" in the book.

The book is very reminiscent of Crowley's "Diary of a Drug Fiend," even mentioning him by name a few times. The writing style is very similar, which could perhaps may cause some readers problems in really becoming engrossed. However, about halfway through the book when the main character begins to truly study the mystery of the paramental, the story becomes very quick and engaging.

While labeled "urban fantasy" it is more in line with horror, and even more specifically, it is dealing with a new breed of occult, something that La Vey and Crowley had a serious hand in. I actually really love this book, and I'm incredibly happy I picked it up despite the reviews I read.

This is a fine example of the modern horror novel. Having lived in San Francisco in the 1970s (as did Leiber), I responded very positively to the authentic setting and even took out a map to check the sites. The main characters (Westen, Cal and Donaldus) were believable and I cared about them. The connections with occult scholarship and earlier weird fiction added other dimensions. The writing seemed a bit careless at times, so perhaps this book was written in a hurry. But I recommend it to Stephen King or Dean Koontz fans who wish to sample other recent dark fantasy.

If you like veins-in-your-teeth horror, this isn't for you. But if you like extraordinarily well-written, deeply unsettling fiction that captures its setting and action so vividly that a later trip to the actual locale revealed no surprises, then this IS for you. After reading "Our Lady Of Darkness" I happened to have a chance to travel to the Corona Heights park in San Francisco and other locales depicted in the book and went "Wow. Leiber REALLY captured this place." Few authors could have equalled the visionary characteristics of Leiber's writing. I recommend this book to all my friends.

Fritz Leiber is acknowledged to be one of the founders of the modern Swords and Sorcery genre with his enjoyable 'Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser' series of stories. He is also the one of first masters of the 'urban horror' genre, notably in 'The Sinful Ones'. 'Our Lady of Darkness' is considered a classic of Urban Horror, but unfortunately I don't believe it lives up to its reputation.
Franz Weston (loosely modeled on Leiber himself) is a writer of horror stories and weird tales who is recovering from alcoholism caused by the death of his wife. He lives in contemporary San Francisco (the novel was published in 1977). One day while looking out his apartment window he sees a strangely robed figure dancing on Corona Heights. This catches his interest and he decides to take a hike there. When he gets there he takes out his binoculars and enjoys the view, but when he looks at his apartment building he sees the same strangely robed figure waving back at him from his window.
Unfortunately after this genuinely creepy start the plot gets mired in philosophical musings and discussions. 'Our Lady of Darkness' is Leiber's tribute to San Francisco and it's leading literary lights most notably Clark Ashton Smith. Interesting as all his may be the novel never regains its suspense and in the end is even more disappointing for having such a promising beginning.

I'll admit it: Sometimes I'm a bad book reviewer. In Picked Up Pieces, literary icon John Updike urged critics to not let their personal ideologies or prior opinions color their comments on a title. I try to do this, I really do. But occasionally I catch myself importing prejudices before I've even finished a novel. Consider what happened when I picked up Fritz Lieber's supernatural thriller Our Lady of Darkness. Lieber has a reputation as a godfather of speculative fiction of all stripes, from down-and-dirty fantasy to creepy horror. Buoyed by such accolades, I made the critical mistake of approaching Lady with a distinctly partial anticipation.

Franz Westen has only just begun to emerge from the alcoholic fog into which he plunged after a brain tumor felled his wife. An author of weird fiction, he dwells in an old San Francisco hotel, a once grand structure now supplanted by ever larger towers that scrape the sky. He's made friends with a few folks who live in the building and even started a relationship with a young philharmonic harpsichordist. But one day he happens upon an odd book he barely remembers buying, something he must've (literally) stumbled upon while befuddled by booze. Titled Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities, it predicts catastrophic upheavals for any overgrown metropolis, a sort of apocalypse facilitated by strange entities called paramentals. Of course, Franz knows it's all nonsense, half-baked hullaballoo cooked up by some turn-of-the-century conman. Still, he keeps the book and the strange journal bundled with it for novelty's sake. Then while climbing a hill outside the city one day, he tries to find his hotel with a pair of high-powered binoculars. What he sees there shakes him to the core -- a strange, shadowy form skulking in his room.

From its multiple references to H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James, you can tell that Lady wants to be a successor to their spooky stories, and it comes close to doing so at times. The climax truly chills, and a nightmare Franz has about his deceased wife made my neck want to detach itself from my body:

"Her fingers were so very slim and silken dry, so very strong and many, all starting to grip tightly -- they were not fingers but wiry black vines rooted inside her skull, growing in profusion out of her cavernous orbits, gushing luxuriantly out of the triangular hold between the nasal and the vomer bones, twining in tendrils from under her upper teeth so white, pushing insidiously and insistently, like grass from sidewalk cracks, out of her pale brown cranium, bursting apart the squamous, sagittal, and coronal sutures."

Sublimely eerie stuff. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to get there. The reference I included to Updike in the beginning is apropos, because for the first half of the novel Lieber seems to channel him rather than the masters of classic horror. Lady's protagonist and secondary characters dawdle about for about half of the novel's length, talking about liberated sexuality and the wonders of drug use and any number of other subjects fashionable among the artistic set in the seventies. (Lieber penned the book in 1977.) Dull and dated. Perhaps my anticipation of discovering a standout work in the genre has colored my opinion, but this is one Lady best left in the gloom.

Warning: I don't think this e-book has ever been proofed by a human editor. There are typos on every single page, most often the transposition of "m" for "th". So every time you come across a weirdly placed "man" "men" "me" and "pam" (sometimes twice in the same paragraph), you'll have to stop and think to yourself, this is supposed to be a "than" "then" "the" and "path". It's really annoying since this seems to be a pretty cool story, and the poor quality conversion to e-book makes it difficult to read smoothly.

This was a good read, and I enjoyed it very much. The reading, however, proved cumbersome due to the large number of repeaded typos. Apparently the book was digitized by some flawed automated system, because the typos were of the same type ("mat" where it should read "that") over and over, but always the typos resulted in real words, which, of course, foils the trusty spell checker. In my experience, the free books that are pounded out by volunteers are of much higher quality.

I can't understand how this book won the World Fantasy Award. Touted as "horror", it was barely scary. Lieber filled his book with a string of impossible coincidences, then pulled a rabbit out of his hat at the end. Avoid.