Alone with the Horrors
Winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award for collection: the canonical one-volume Campbell and a standard text in any serious horror education.
Book Entry · Horror
What is Our Lady of Darkness about?
Recovering alcoholic horror writer Franz Westen — Leiber, barely disguised, grieving his wife as Leiber grieved his — spots a robed figure waving from Corona Heights through his binoculars, and then realises the figure is waving from the spot where he stands. The trail leads through the occult history of bohemian San Francisco, Clark Ashton Smith's journals and the sinister science of 'megapolisomancy': the divination and summoning of the paramental entities that vast cities breed. Tender, autobiographical and quietly terrifying — haunted-city fiction's finest hour.
Why it matters
World Fantasy Award winner (1978) and the capstone of Leiber's invention of urban supernatural horror, begun with 'Smoke Ghost' in 1941.
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