Έχω όλα τα βιβλία του Λάιμπερ που έχουν μεταφραστεί στα ελληνικά (δεν είναι και πολλά, δυστυχώς, μόλις έξι συν σκόρπιες ιστορίες εδώ και κει), αλλά αυτό είναι μόλις το πρώτο που διαβάζω. Συνδυάζει στοιχεία urban fantasy και τρόμου και αυτός ο συνδυασμός μου άρεσε πολύ. Σίγουρα το βιβλίο δεν είναι για όλα τα γούστα, υπάρχει αρκετό μπλα μπλα και οι χαρακτηριστικές σκηνές όπου υπάρχει δράση δεν είναι ιδιαίτερα πολλές, αλλά σίγουρα η όλη ατμόσφαιρα είναι σκοτεινή και υπάρχουν σκηνές (ειδικά στο τέλος) που τρομάζουν. Η όλη ιστορία διαδραματίζεται στο Σαν Φρανσίσκο κατά τα τέλη της δεκαετίας του '60 και πρωταγωνιστής είναι ο Φραντς Γουέστεν, πρώην αλκοολικός και νυν παλπ συγγραφέας βιβλίων τρόμου και φαντασίας. Ο Φραντς διαβάζει πολλά και διάφορα μυστηριώδη βιβλία που ασχολούνται με το υπερφυσικό. Δυο από αυτά είναι ένα βιβλίο του μυστηριώδη Τιμπό Ντε Καστρί που εφηύρε τον όρο Megapolisomancy και ένα ημερολόγιο που πιθανότατα ανήκει στον μεγάλο συγγραφέα του φανταστικού Κλαρκ Άστον Σμιθ. Δεν μπορώ να πω σε λίγες γραμμές τι γίνεται στην ιστορία, απλά βασικό θέμα του είναι η ενέργεια που υπάρχει στις μεγαλουπόλεις, όπου διάφορες δυνάμεις τρέφονται από τους ουρανοξύστες, τα υπόγεια τούνελ και γενικά ό,τι αποτελείται από ατσάλι και γυαλί. Αυτές οι δυνάμεις είναι σαν φαντάσματα και μπορούν να πάρουν διάφορες μορφές. Το βιβλίο βρίθει αναφορών γύρω από συγγραφείς (π.χ. Λάβκραφτ, Μάχεν, Κ. Α. Σμιθ, Λόντον, Χάμετ, Κρόουλι κλπ) και διάφορα μυστηριώδη και μη βιβλία, αλλά φυσικά και γύρω από μεταφυσικά και υπερφυσικά στοιχεία. Η γραφή του Λάιμπερ μου φάνηκε πολύ καλή και βοήθησε πολύ ώστε να μην χάσω την μπάλα με τόσες λογοτεχνικές και μη αναφορές, οι περιγραφές όπου χρειαζόταν να φτιάξει ατμόσφαιρα ήταν καλές, αλλά οι χαρακτήρες δεν είχαν και τόσο βάθος, όχι ότι ήταν αδιάφοροι βέβαια, αλλά οι περισσότεροι απλώς υπήρχαν εκεί δίχως μεγάλη και σημαντική συμμετοχή. Επειδή στο βιβλίο υπήρχαν κάμποσες αναφορές σε κτίρια και περιοχές του Σαν Φρανσίσκο, ένας χάρτης της πόλης θα με βοηθούσε να προσανατολιστώ κάπως, αλλά αυτό είναι παράπονο για την ελληνική έκδοση (το μοναδικό, μιας και η μετάφραση μου φάνηκε εξαιρετική). Το βιβλίο έθιξε ενδιαφέροντα και ιντριγκαδόρικα θέματα και μ'έκανε να θέλω να ψάξω περισσότερα για την όλη μεταφυσική θεωρία megapolisomancy. Σίγουρα μια διαφορετική και ξεχωριστή λογοτεχνική εμπειρία.
From ISawLightningFall.comI'll admit it: Sometimes I'm a bad book reviewer. In Picked Up Pieces, literary icon John Updike urged critics to not let their personal ideologies or prior opinions color their comments on a title. I try to do this, I really do. But occasionally I catch myself importing prejudices before I've even finished a novel. Consider what happened when I picked up Fritz Lieber's supernatural thriller Our Lady of Darkness. Lieber has a reputation as a godfather of speculative fiction of all stripes, from down-and-dirty fantasy to creepy horror. Buoyed by such accolades, I made the critical mistake of approaching Lady with a distinctly partial anticipation. Franz Westen has only just begun to emerge from the alcoholic fog into which he plunged after a brain tumor felled his wife. An author of weird fiction, he dwells in an old San Francisco hotel, a once grand structure now supplanted by ever larger towers that scrape the sky. He's made friends with a few folks who live in the building and even started a relationship with a young philharmonic harpsichordist. But one day he happens upon an odd book he barely remembers buying, something he must've (literally) stumbled upon while befuddled by booze. Titled Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities, it predicts catastrophic upheavals for any overgrown metropolis, a sort of apocalypse facilitated by strange entities called paramentals. Of course, Franz knows it's all nonsense, half-baked hullaballoo cooked up by some turn-of-the-century conman. Still, he keeps the book and the strange journal bundled with it for novelty's sake. Then while climbing a hill outside the city one day, he tries to find his hotel with a pair of high-powered binoculars. What he sees there shakes him to the core -- a strange, shadowy form skulking in his room. From its multiple references to H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James, you can tell that Lady wants to be a successor to their spooky stories, and it comes close to doing so at times. The climax truly chills, and a nightmare Franz has about his deceased wife made my neck want to detach itself from my body:"Her fingers were so very slim and silken dry, so very strong and many, all starting to grip tightly -- they were not fingers but wiry black vines rooted inside her skull, growing in profusion out of her cavernous orbits, gushing luxuriantly out of the triangular hold between the nasal and the vomer bones, twining in tendrils from under her upper teeth so white, pushing insidiously and insistently, like grass from sidewalk cracks, out of her pale brown cranium, bursting apart the squamous, sagittal, and coronal sutures."Sublimely eerie stuff. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to get there. The reference I included to Updike in the beginning is apropos, because for the first half of the novel Lieber seems to channel him rather than the masters of classic horror. Lady's protagonist and secondary characters dawdle about for about half of the novel's length, talking about liberated sexuality and the wonders of drug use and any number of other subjects fashionable among the artistic set in the seventies. (Lieber penned the book in 1977.) Dull and dated. Perhaps my anticipation of discovering a standout work in the genre has colored my opinion, but this is one Lady best left in the gloom.
Do You like book Our Lady Of Darkness (1984)?
I want to make it perfectly clear that this is all. Neil. Gaiman's. fault.Awhile ago, I came across a list of Gaiman's favorite books and this was on it. What the hey, I said. I'll take a stab at that! Well, stab taken, and it's a good thing that I wasn't planing on sleeping any time soon. Wow, wow, wow - it's been awhile since a book creeped me out this badly!Recovering alcoholic, horror writer Franz Westen has a particularly soft spot in his heart for San Fransisco's quirky history - especially it's long and strange occult past. During the day Franz divides his time between writing a few pot boilers to pay rent and doing some research into the history of some of SF's more peculiar historical occult characters, which leads him to find the journal of a young poet who was particularly entranced with one of the more obscure and undoubtedly sinister figures of occult history - SF's own Alistair Crowley - "Tiberius" and his infamous mistress that was referred to by his contemporaries as the "Lady of Darkness". Franz becomes obsessed with the journal and the story being unfolded in it's pages, in particular, the mysterious house the young poet once occupied, "Six or Seven Roads". As Franz desperately tries to unlock the mystery of the young poet's fate, the journal and an eerie sighting he makes early one morning from his bedroom window, the story carefully maneuvers the reader along into the very depths of madness, cult psychology, and paranormal activity that secure Leiber's reputation as one of the last century's greater ghost story writers. This is my second Leiber novel now (being previously impressed with The The Conjure Wife), and one thing that struck me was how deftly Leiber was able to work things like scientific logic into the story line in a way that seemed believable. Where as CW was more of a parable of scientific thinking taken to a dangerous extreme as a result of merging progressive thinking sans human feeling and emotion, OLoD was more a study on the ability to sooth and quiet the mind through logic, and how the more nobler pursuits of higher study in art, philosophy and mathematics can bring peace to a person. Here scholarship is both the undoing and the salvation of the characters depending on how they choose to use it, and while Leiber once again brings in a young lady who may or may not be a witch, this time her divining rods and crystal balls are instead the Pythagorean theorem and Bach's concertos.Over all this was another one of Leiber's exploratory horror novels and I enjoyed it very much for what it was. I know a lot of people like to compaire him to Lovecraft, but really I think he writes in the much older tradition of writers such as Algernon Blackwood. Oh, to be sure, that old Eldritchian Horror vibe is still there, but there's a smooth, swuave and charming flow to the words here that Lovecraft never really possessed.
—Kitty
This was one of the most disappointing reads I've ever endured. I love Leiber, he's one of my favorite authors and I spent six years trolling the bins at used bookstores for his material, which is why I thought it a great coup when for the first time ever I spotted this book and mistook it for a lost gem. It tried for a Salem's Lot style horror-in-a-prosaic setting, this time modern (mid 70's) San Francisco and it tosses in a Lovecraftian element with a book of forbidden knowledge that opens up a vista of terror for the protagonist. Sounds good, right? Not so much. The books spends so much time building up the prosaic setting that the horror is almost an afterthought. I really wanted to enjoy it, but it was just a complete bore.
—Andy
Fritz Leiber dips into the lore and literature of the weird tale and Megapolisomancy, the pseudoscience of haunted cities, using an array of texts and lore from Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and other weird pulp writers, in addition to dark occult societies to produce a novel that, if not particularly scary, is absorbing. Leiber's style in delivering this novel is more Ramsey Campbell, then HP Lovecraft or CA Smith.A former alcoholic pulp writer, Franz Westen, living in San Francisco, finds a secret, supposedly destroyed, text by occultist Thibaut de Castries on Megapolisomancy. Along with the text is an unfinished journal by Clark Ashton Smith, written in the 1920’s, recording Smith’s investigations into de Castries’s occult practices, including a society known as the Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk whose acolytes briefly included Ambrose Bierce and Jack London. As everyone knows, once you stumble across something like this in an old bookstore, things are likely to get weird as long as you don’t have someone hanging around telling you how boring it all is. The name dropping along the way goes from Aleister Crowley to Fu Manchu. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re a fan of forbidden lore and stories by MR James, CA Smith, HP Lovecraft, and Ramsey Campbell, you might like this novel, published in 1977.
—Kurt Reichenbaugh
