"The ancient Egyptians only buried people in their pyramids. We are living in ours." — Thibaut de Castries
Serialised in 1977, The Pale Brown Thing is a shorter version of Fritz Leiber’s World Fantasy Award-winning novel of the supernatural, Our Lady of Darkness. Leiber maintained that the two texts “should be regarded as the same story told at different times”; thus this volume reprints The Pale Brown Thing for the first time in nearly forty years, with an introduction by the author’s friend, Californian poet Donald Sidney-Fryer. The novella stands as Leiber’s vision of 1970s San Francisco: a city imbued with an eccentric vibe and nefarious entities, in which pulp writer Franz Westen uncovers an alternate portrait of the city’s fin de siecle literary set — Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Clark Ashton Smith — as well as the darker invocations of occultist Thibaut de Castries and a pale brown inhabitant of Corona Heights.
Contents
"Thibaut de Castries, Revenant"
Donald Sidney-Fryer
"The Pale Brown Thing"
Fritz Leiber
"Story-telling Wonder-questing, Mortal Me:
The Transformation of The Pale Brown Thing into Our Lady of Darkness"
John Howard
Acknowledgements
Fritz Leiber was born in Chicago on 24 December 1910. Although trained as an actor, he made his name among the pages of the pulp magazines of the 1930s and ’40s. After a brief correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, Leiber began writing in earnest, penning classics of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, including Conjure Wife, the Hugo Award-winning Ill Met in Lankhmar, and the pioneering tale of urban supernaturalism “Smoke Ghost”. Leiber passed away in San Francisco in 1992 at the age of eighty-one.
