![]() It’s an odd novel and was overall an uncomfortable reading experience, but not in the way I’m convinced Leiber intended. However, at the traditional book sale at the FoAM AGM, I acquired the Fontana version for about £1. I knew that the superb Swan River Press in Dublin had brought out a new edition of the original iteration of Our Lady of Darkness, under the title The Pale Brown Thing, and I had been getting round to buying what I knew would be an impeccably well-produced hardback. I have also been teaching Thomas de Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis for the past two years-from which the title of the novel is lifted-and become fascinated by the mysterious, melancholy allure of the constituent essays or prose poems, which seem to absorb the reader into a narcotised molasses of oneiric yet palpable grief (or something). ![]() Although not a Leiber devotee-I somehow never got to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser when a Dungeons & Dragons-playing teenager-I had very much enjoyed his ‘Black Gondoliers’ recently and was intrigued by what I had heard about Our Lady. ![]() I had been meaning to read it for a while. At the recent Annual General Meeting of the Friends of Arthur Machen, I acquired a 1978 Fontana paperback edition of Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness. ![]()
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