The title is taken from Thomas De Quincey's Suspiria de Profundis, and references are also made to M. The novel mentions authors like Jack London and the baroque poet Clark Ashton Smith, who lived part of their lives in San Francisco. Several of the other characters are thinly disguised versions of people active in Bay Area fandom in the mid-1970s. As late as 2012, fantasy fans could take a walking tour of the city that included all the novel's main locations. The novel is set in actual San Francisco locations, including Corona Heights and the Sutro TV Tower behind it. Like the author, Westen is an amateur astronomer who is looking for ways to re-engage with the life around him, and who lives at the address (811 Geary St) where Leiber lived at the time. Mike Humbert's website provides a detailed review of the locations of Our Lady of Darkness.Like the protagonist Franz Westen, Leiber was recovering from his wife's death a number of years previously and descending into alcoholism.Several people have made a 'pilgrimage' out of visiting the places Leiber refers to in the novel, all of which are quite real. He also catalogues and comments on San Francisco. The main antagonist in the novella is a Paramental entity nicknamed Taffy.įritz Leiber, with all his skill as a writer, catalogues and comments on the whole Lovecraft Circle and its milieu in this work. Fritz Leiber also creates in the figure of Franz Westen a very accurate autobiographical figure, to the point of almost being a self-insert. Every element of contemporary 1976 San Francisco is described in detail, accurately and with affection. The novella is notable for taking the Lovecraftian approach of using real-world locations and parodies thereof to the logical extreme.

It introduces the concepts of Paramentals, Megalopolisomancy and also references the magical powers of music for good and evil. This[Fritz Leiber novella is a pioneering early work of urban fantasy. He walks to Corona Heights and looks back at his building to discover the figure waving at him from his apartment window-and to find himself caught in a century‑spanning curse that may have destroyed Ambrose Bierce, Clark Ashton Smith and Jack London. While studying his beloved city through binoculars from his apartment window, he is astonished to see a mysterious figure waving at him from a hilltop two miles away. Our Lady of Darkness introduces San Francisco horror writer Franz Westen.

Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber