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A review by throatsprockets
Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber
4.0
A pretty good attempt at bringing Lovecraftian horror into the modern day of 1978, Our Lady of Darkness is evocative, atmospheric and sometimes deeply personal. This time the cyclopean city of eldritch dread is San Francisco, and the dreaded tower is the apartment building that Fritz Leiber was living in at the time. Most of the characters are thinly disguised palimpsests of Leiber's friends, and the protagonist Franz Westen is clearly based on Leiber himself. Leiber even works his own alcoholism and his grief at the relatively recent death of his wife into the story.
It involves a writer of supernatural fiction, down on his luck and reduced to novelizing a trashy tv show, who has found a mysterious book which details the supernatural underpinnings of big cities. When he investigates the book and its mysterious author, Westen discovers that he is at the centre of a sinister plot dating back decades and that malevolent entities have him in their sights.
The mid-1970s setting dates the book quite a lot, and the attitude the characters take to sexuality sometimes unintentionally becomes even creepier than the supernatural happenings. Some of the exposition is overdone and the dialogue is often unconvincing. But when it flies it soars, and unlike a lot of horror novels it lands the ending.
It involves a writer of supernatural fiction, down on his luck and reduced to novelizing a trashy tv show, who has found a mysterious book which details the supernatural underpinnings of big cities. When he investigates the book and its mysterious author, Westen discovers that he is at the centre of a sinister plot dating back decades and that malevolent entities have him in their sights.
The mid-1970s setting dates the book quite a lot, and the attitude the characters take to sexuality sometimes unintentionally becomes even creepier than the supernatural happenings. Some of the exposition is overdone and the dialogue is often unconvincing. But when it flies it soars, and unlike a lot of horror novels it lands the ending.