If you pass by 811 Geary Street in San Francisco, near Hyde, you might notice a plaque stating that the building is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. "Fritz Leiber, acclaimed author of fantasy, horror and science fiction, lived her from 1969-1977 when he wrote his classic, Our Lady of Darkness , which won the World Fantasy Award in 1978."
What the plaque doesn’t mention is that this same building plays a central role in Leiber's quirky late career novel—in fact, you might say that 811 Geary is the star of the book. It's a haunted building in the novel. But, from another perspective, Leiber himself haunts Our Lady of Darkness . The work is intensely autobiographical—indeed after the 100-page sketch of his life and times included in Leiber's 1984 anthology The Ghost Light , this late novel is the next place to go for first-hand testimony from the influential genre-crossing author.
Leiber's novel is cited for its historical importance...but is still out of print.
Leiber’s alter ego in Our Lady of Darkness is horror writer Franz Westen, a recovering alcoholic who is also dealing with grief in the aftermath of his wife’s death. The same could be said of Leiber during his San Francisco years: despite a career of successes and awards—he had won six coveted Hugo Awards before publishing Our Lady of Darkness , and earned another eight nominations—Leiber struggled financially and emotionally. Leiber, now in his late sixties and a legend within the world of genre fiction, was forced to write his stories on a manual typewriter propped over a sink in his cramped quarters. The building was located in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, a down-and-out area that served, during this juncture in the city’s history, as a low-cost haven for refugees from Southeast Asian conflicts. But the area also was known for its homeless, addicts and street crimes.
I’m hardly surprised that Leiber turned this building into a maleficent force in his San Francisco novel. But the way he achieves this earns my respect. Leiber takes the familiar concept of a haunted house, and develops it in ways never dreamt of by Poe and Lovecraft . He even invents a new occult science called Megapolisomancy, which explores the dark magic inherent in big buildings and large cities. The visionary inventor of this supernatural discipline, Thibaut de Castries, grasped the unsettling fact that urban living creates supernatural disturbances and bring forth dark powers, known as paramentals , forces that possess enormous potential for destruction and psychic upheaval.
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Yes, long before Haruki Murakami brought magical realism to Tokyo, Fritz Leiber had created his own unique breed of extravagant inner city fantasy. In this book, we find a forerunner to all those later works about supernatural beings haunting major cities, from 1Q84 to Neverwhere . Readers who enjoy the special flavor of this juxtaposition of modern urban planning and old school horror —the kind also exemplified by China Miéville’s The City and The City or Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale —will want to seek out this important predecessor.
Thibaut de Castries and his new science of cities are make-believe, drawn from the fertile imagination of Fritz Leiber. But our author pulls many historic figures into his account, and speculates that de Castries and his supernatural paramentals might well have been behind the mysterious disappearance of Ambrose Bierce , the poisonings of Nora May French and George Sterling, and the possible suicide of Jack London. Students of early California literary history will enjoy the clever use Leiber makes of its most colorful personages. In these pages, readers will also encounter Clark Ashton Smith , Dashiell Hammett, even Fritz Leiber himself, as the line between history and fantasy blurs, and sometimes disappears.
Our protagonist Franz Westen earns a living churning out horror stories, but fears that the time has passed for this sort of work. People tell him that "there is no such thing as supernatural horror anymore—that science has solved, or can solve, all mysteries…that modern people are too sophisticated and knowledgeable to be scared of ghosts even for kicks.” But Westen soon learns, from firsthand experience, that modern life has hardly banished supernatural forces, but may have actually created new ones.
The enormous metaphysical impact of the Transamerica Pyramid, a prepossessing monolith that sill looms over the San Francisco skyline (and was erected five years before Leiber published Our Lady of Darkness ), may have served as the tipping point that unleashed these deadly paramentals. Other seemingly innocent parts of the city—Sutro Tower, the eminence of Corona Heights Park—also contribute to the dark magic. Westen eventually finds himself haunted by a monstrous figure, who seems to both threaten and taunt the troubled author—but never when others are around to witness it. Westen’s enemy is the city embodied as dark adversary, a demon who, like many urban criminals, prefers to prey on those who wander off on their own.
Nothing is as it seems in this alternative City by the Bay. In a brilliant and very symbolic ending, our pulp fiction writer finds that the paper pulp itself may destroy the author who churned out so many pages for so many years. You can almost hear Fritz Leiber chuckling to himself as constructed this richly ironic adversary for his fictional alter ago.
In short, Leiber has delivered a strange, and strangely pleasing book that deserves to be far better known. Our Lady of Darkness is out-of-print—as are too many Leiber books. At some point, the Library of America or another astute publisher will start reissuing these works in a systematic and comprehensive way. Mark my words: Fritz Leiber will be rehabilitated as a 'serious' writer just as has happened to Lovecraft and Dick . Leiber deserves that, not just for the imagination and wit that marks his best work, but also for his tremendous impact on contemporary storytelling. Who could even begin to count how many movies, video games, graphic novels and genre works have drawn inspiration from stories?
But when the Leiber renaissance takes place, Our Lady of Darkness should be one of the first books to get the lavishly introduced and fully annotated treatment. Leiber has not just delivered an ingenious horror story, a new theory of urban malaise, and a disguised autobiography, but also a mini-history of early commercial fiction in San Francisco. Yes, it’s still pulp fiction, but straining at the seams—just like the adversary in this unconventional novel—to be so much more.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.
Long before Murakami and Gaiman mixed malevolent magic with urban landscapes, Fritz Leiber showed the way with Our Lady of Darkness
Leiber, now in his late sixties and a legend within the world of genre fiction, was forced to write his stories on a manual typewriter propped over a sink in his cramped quarters.