Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions is a new collection of stories by Fritz Leiber. Assembled here is a selection of Leiber’s most horrific tales, many of which are previously uncollected and have been virtually unobtainable for decades.

During his more than fifty years of writing, Leiber was an acknowledged master of the weird tale and the stories in this collection include works originally published in magazines from the 1940′s onward, including such venues as ‘Unknown,’ ‘Thrilling Mystery,’ ‘Startling Stories’ and ‘Fantasy’ and also works published over the decades in such places as ‘Rogue,’ ‘The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,’ ‘Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine’ and the acclaimed horror specialty magazine ‘Whispers 13-14.’

Besides Smoke Ghost (1941), the stories include Cry Witch! (1951), I’m Looking for Jeff (1952), Ms. Found in a Maelstrom (1959), The Button Molder (1979), Dark Wings (1976) and (Original to this volume) The Enormous Bedroom (2001).

From the riveting Spider Mansion and The Phantom Slayer from Weird Tales to the more recent Lie Still, Snow White and Black Has Its Charms from rare, small-press magazines, this collection provides a stunning overview. While much of Leiber’s seminal science-fiction and fantasy remains in print, his work in the field of supernatural horror has been sadly neglected until now. Edited by John Pelan and Steve Savile.

If you love Leiber’s stories you can follow up Smoke Ghost with The Black Gondolier, and from there you can select some novels from his author page.

What if half the world’s population – the female half -  practiced witchcraft and kept it a secret from men?

In Science Fiction Grand Master Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife Norman Saylor, a professor of ethnology, discovers his wife Tansy has put his research into practice for the sake of protecting him from other spell-casting faculty wives who wish to further their own husbands’ careers. A man of science, Norman has only an academic interest in the subject of magic and superstition and forces Tansy to cease all her workings and to burn all her charms. As soon as Norman burns the last charm, things start to fall apart. He has a run-in with a former student, his student-secretary accuses him of having seduced her, and he is passed over for a promotion that had seemed certain.

Norman begins to have more than his fair share of small accidents: cutting himself while shaving, stepping on carpet tacks, cutting his hand with a letter opener, and more. He begins to imagine that there is a dark presence exploiting his fear of trucks. Tansy takes his curse upon herself forcing him to overcome his disbelief and use witchcraft to save his wife’s body—and her soul.

Originally published in 1953, Conjure Wife is considered a modern classic of horror-fantasy and has been adapted for film three times: “Burn, Witch Burn” (1962); “Weird Woman” (1944); and “Witch’s Brew” (1980). Yet another film remake is in the works.

E-Reads carries many great Fritz Leiber novels including the classic Lankhmar series. Click here for a complete list.

While studying his beloved San Francisco through binoculars from his apartment window, horror writer Franz Westen is astonished to see a mysterious figure waving at him from a hilltop two miles away. He walks to Corona Heights and looks back at his building – and discovers the same figure waving at him from his apartment window! He soon finds himself caught in a century-spanning curse that may have destroyed Clark Ashton Smith and Jack London.

The book is Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber, and it was 1978 winner of the World Fantasy Award. E-Reads is happy to offer it as an e-book. The print version, paired with another Leiber horror classic, Conjure Wife, is available from Tor.

“In today’s terms this is horror in the style of The Blair Witch Project. A story permeated by a sense of menacing creepiness” says one Amazon.com reviewer.

Fritz Leiber is considered one of science fiction’s legends. Author of a prodigious number of stories and novels, many of which were made into films, he is best known as creator of the classic Lankhmar fantasy series. Leiber has won awards too numerous to count including the coveted Hugo and Nebula, and was honored as a lifetime Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. He died in 1992.

Publication of Our Lady of Darkness brings to 13 the number of works by Leiber published by E-Reads. Visit our Leiber page to see them all and order any that may be missing from your collection.

Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) may be best known as a fantasy writer, but he published widely and successfully in the horror and science fiction fields. One of his major SF creations is the Change War, a series of stories and short novels about rival time-traveling forces locked in a bitter, ages-long struggle for control of the human universe where battles alter history and then change it again until there’s no certainty about what might once have happened.

The most notable work of the series is the Hugo Award-winning novel The Big Time in which doctors, entertainers, and wounded soldiers find themselves treacherously trapped with an activated atomic bomb inside the Place, a room existing outside of space-time. Leiber creates a tense, claustrophobic SF mystery, and a brilliant, unique locked-room whodunit. In addition to the Hugo, Nebula, Derleth, Lovecraft, and World Fantasy Awards, Fritz Leiber received the Grand Master of Fantasy (Gandalf) Award, the Life Achievement Lovecraft Award, and the Grand Master Nebula Award.

The Big Time may be purchased as an e-book or print volume.

E-Reads publishes many of Leiber’s greatest works including Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, which Time Magazine’s book editor, Lev Grossman, named as one of the top six fantasy works of all time. View E-Reads’ Leiber book list here.

RC

Lev Grossman, Time Magazine‘s book editor, has named Fritz Leiber’s “Lankhmar” series featuring the heroes Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser as among the The Six Greatest Fantasy Novels of All Time.

The list (not ordered or ranked) is:

– The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
– The Once and Future King by T.H. White
– Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories
– The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
– Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
– Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

E-Reads is proud to be the publisher of the seven volumes of the Lankhmar series plus some other great Leiber works as well.

Introducing Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser

If you haven’t yet enjoyed the pleasures of Leiber’s world, start at the beginning.

Swords and Deviltry, the first book of Leiber’s landmark series, introduces us to a strange world where our two strangers find the familiar in themselves and discover the icy power of female magic. Three master-magician femme-fatales and a sprightly lad illuminate the bonds between father and son, the relationship between the bravado of the imagination, and the courage of fools. A hedge wizard explains the cold war between the sexes. Mouse and Fafhrd meet again and learn the truth of how Mouse became the Gray Mouser. Together they traverse the smoke and mirrors of Lankhmar learning more and more of the foggy world in which they live, mapping the sinister silent symptoms of the never-ending night-smog. They follow the night-smog’s relation to the region’s longing for larceny and the hazy opiate of vanity. Last but certainly not least, they experience the pleasures and pains of the City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokers that will lead them to countless more adventures and misadventures.

About Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber is considered one of science fiction’s legends. Author of a prodigious number of stories and novels, many of which were made into films, he is best known as creator of the classic Lankhmar fantasy series. Fritz Leiber has won awards too numerous to count including the coveted Hugo and Nebula, and was honored as a lifetime Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. He died in 1992.

Richard Curtis

The Dark Horse paperback edition of The Knight and Knave of Swords, the seventh novel in Fritz Leiber’s classic Lankhmar fantasy adventure series, which Publishers Weekly described as “One of the great works of fantasy of this century,” is now on sale. Or you may wish to buy E-Reads’ e-book edition. (Pictured on the left is the Dark Horse cover and on the right, the E-Reads cover.)

Ramsey Campbell, the highly regarded British horror author called him, “the greatest living writer of supernatural horror fiction”. Drawing many of his own themes from Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, and H.P Lovecraft, master manipulator Fritz Leiber is a worldwide legend within the Fantasy genre, actually having coined the term “Sword and Sorcery” that would describe the sub-genre he would more than help create.

While THE LORD OF THE RINGS took the world by storm, Leiber’s fantastic but thoroughly flawed anti-heroes, Fafhrd and Grey Mouser, adventured and stumbled deep within the caves of Inner Earth as well, albeit a different one than Tolkien’s. They wondered and wandered to the edges of the Outer Sea, across the Land of Nehwon and throughout every nook and cranny of gothic Lankhmar, Nehwon’s grandest and most mystically corrupt city. Lankhmar is Leiber’s fully realized, vivid, incarnation of urban decay and civilization’s corroding effect on the human psyche. Fafhrd and Mouse are not innocents; their world is no land of honor and righteousness. It is a world of human complexities and violent action, of discovery and mystery, of swords and sorcery.

“Fritz Leiber’s tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are virtually a genre unto themselves. Urbane, idiosyncratic, comic, erotic and human, spiked with believable action of a master fantasist!”
–William Gibson

“After too long a wait, the master story teller of us all returns with a huge, anecdotal adventure in the magic-drenched lives of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Glowing imagination melds with gorgeous language to make this one of Leiber’s very best…which is a better best than this poor world usually has to offer. Leiber’s back: rejoice!”
-Harlan Ellison

“It’s all Fritz Leiber’s fault. If he weren’t such a deadly fine fantasist I wouldn’t be stopping everything to read his tales. And if he weren’t such a master I wouldn’t occasionally look out of the window and wish he’d interrupt my routine again, as he doesn’t do it often enough. THE KNIGHT AND KNAVE OF SWORDS came into my life and took over an otherwise fully programmed afternoon. I stop everything when a new Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story comes into my hands.”
–Roger Zelazny

Visit Leiber’s page on E-Reads to see the complete Lankhmar series and some other great Leiber novels as well.

RC

Best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman has recorded special introductions for each of seven classic novels in the audio edition of Fritz Leiber’s classic Lankhmar fantasy series. Listen to Gaiman describe the importance of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories and how they influenced him as a young writer.

The e-book edition of the series is published by E-Reads, the print edition by Dark Horse.

RC

Assembled in The Black Gondolier is a selection of some of Fritz Leiber’s most horrific tales, many virtually unobtainable for decades. From the riveting “Spider Mansion” and “The Phantom Slayer” from Weird Tales to the more recent “Lie Still, Snow White” and “Black Has Its Charms” culled from rare, small-press magazines, this collection provides an overview of Leiber’s fifty-plus years as an acknowledged master of the weird tale. While much of his seminal science fiction and fantasy remains in print, his work in the field of supernatural horror has been sadly neglected.

Until now.

- Richard Curtis

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” said philosopher George Santayana, and never were truer words spoken. It’s easy to get good and depressed studying history and its endless cycle of war and devastation, followed by recovery and prosperity, then slipping into dissension, strife, and, once again, war.

Don’t expect Fritz Leiber’s Gather, Darkness to offer a different, uplifting message. This science fiction classic, set 360 years after a nuclear holocaust has thrown mankind into yet another dark age, tells the story of a common man who rises to become a priest in the service of the Great God. Challenging a fraudulent priesthood that rules through fear and superstition, his rebellion against the power of the priests throws him headlong into the middle of the greatest holy war the world has ever seen.

If this dark story line seems familiar, you need only apply it to any era of human history and it will ring true. Bleak though it may be, Leiber’s great novel reminds us that there is no higher value than justice, and there are men and women prepared to go to war in order to see that value prevail.

– Richard Curtis

“Wonderful, magical Fritz Leiber, before whom Bradbury and Sturgeon and Norton and Goldman and Barth and Vonnegut bow, not to mention Robinson, Busby, Anderson and even yours truly, the maddest egomaniac of them all. Fritz Leiber, very likely the best of all of us, the man who has won more awards than anyone else in the genre, the man whose words have lifted this too often wretched category to Olympian heights more than anyone cares to mention.”

That encomium was written by Harlan Ellison, whose stinginess with praise is legendary. But like the great authors he cites, Ellison knows a master when he sees one, and if Fritz Leiber can humble “the maddest egomaniac of them all,” it is incumbent on us to bend a knee as well.

Fritz Leiber was not merely a master but, literally a Grand Master, recipient of science fiction’s highest honor, the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master award bestowed upon a living author for a lifetime achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy. Residing with Leiber on this pinnacle are such gods as Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Silverberg, Damon Knight, Anne McCaffery, Andre Norton and Ellison himself.

Leiber created not just a grand, mystic, gothically decadent and corrupt city – Lankhmar, capital of the land of Nehwon – but gave us two adventurers whose dark and often debauched characters were violently antithetical to the sterling personalities of the heroes we yearn to identify with. Or do we? If you see the real world as decadent and believe that in order to combat evil we must not only get our hands dirty but plunge to the elbows in gore — well then, you are ready for Fafhrd and Gray Mouser. Start with Book One, Swords and Deviltry, and if you can stop short of the last page of Book Seven, you must possess a will stronger than Leiber’s swords and sorcery.

In addition to the seven classic Swords novels, E-Reads carries four non-Lankhmar Leiber books, and there are more to come.

Dark Horse is currently reissuing the books in paperback, so check out their site or visit Amazon.com and collect them all.

Harlan Ellison must always have the last word, and here’s it is on Fritz Leiber: “For anyone who loves great literature, Fritz Leiber walked on water.”

- Richard Curtis