Norman casts a spell at the behest of an endangered Tansy, and he completes it on time-well, almost on time, and then.įritz Leiber is an absolute pleasure to read. It is then that the book becomes even more interesting. It is set in a small American college filled with pseudo-gothic architecture (keep your eye on those gargoyles-they may be important later!) and where the petty politics are so nasty they remind me of an old joke: 'Why are academic politics so vicious?' 'Because the stakes are so small.'įor the first half of the book, the premise pretty much writes itself as we observe the harrying of nice young sociology prof Norman Saylor and his wife Tansy-poor, bare forked animals deprived of the comforts of witchcraft.

Many novels and films-and an infinity of TV dramas and sitcoms-have used Leiber's idea, but few of them have produced a book as absorbing and well plotted as this one.

What if all the women are witches and keep their craft secret from their husbands? What if their husbands' success in the workplace-their good performance reviews, their promotions, their smallest political victories-are due to their spouses' spells and circles of protection? And what would happen if one of the men found out, and persuaded his wife to renounce magic? The premise of this book must have seemed remarkably clever-and unusual-when it appeared in 1943. Used These Alternate Names: Maurice Breçon, Fric Lajber, Fritz Leiber, Jr., Fritz R. Leiber's capacity for endless self-reinvention and productive self-examination kept him, until his death, one of the most modern of his sf generation. Leiber's late short fiction, and the fine horror novel Our Lady of Darkness, combine autobiographical issues like his struggle with depression and alcoholism with meditations on the emotional content of the fantastic genres. Leiber's science fiction includes the planet-smashing The Wanderer in which a large cast mostly survive flood, fire, and the sexual attentions of feline aliens, and the satirical A Spectre is Haunting Texas in which a gangling, exo-skeleton-clad actor from the Moon leads a revolution and finds his true love.

He found his mature voice early in the first of the sword-and-sorcery adventures featuring the large sensitive barbarian Fafhrd and the small street-smart-ish Gray Mouser he returned to this series at various points in his career, using it sometimes for farce and sometimes for gloomy mood pieces-The Swords of Lankhmar is perhaps the best single volume of their adventures. was one of the more interesting of the young writers who came into HP Lovecraft's orbit, and some of his best early short fiction is horror rather than sf or fantasy.

Conjure wife book