Publications: Reviews

SMOKE GHOST & OTHER APPARITIONS by Fritz Leiber

Midnight House 2002 305pp $40.00

Fritz Leiber (1910-92) was one of the most creative writers in the field of supernatural horror. He was also a master of the heroic fantasy genre (with the rightly perennially-available Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series), and an award-winning science fiction writer. So it is hardly surprising that even during his lifetime Leiber’s overall impact on all three fields was muffled, and his all-round importance often never quite recognised.

Leiber frequently used a gritty urban setting for his horror -- with its traditional elements subjected to modernization, and throwing the characters and action into the deep end of a contemporary milieu. Leiber wrote out of the experiences and concerns in his life. His cities contain undiscovered territories and secret lives. It is in the midst of the ordinary, then, that the unusual happens…. Leiber’s interest in psychology, and concerns about aging and the passing of time also appear as regular themes, and develop in story after story, as do treatments of his intermittent alcoholism and often fraught family life, and his feelings about women.

Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions is the second collection of Fritz Leiber’s supernatural and macabre fiction to be edited by John Pelan and Steve Savile. Like its predecessor The Black Gondolier & Other Stories, it is intended to continue the project of restoring to print “the most significant of Leiber’s weird tales that have been unavailable for twenty or more years”. Once again the editors have performed a valuable service to everyone interested in the best in “weird” fiction.

“Smoke Ghost” itself, which dates from 1941, is the sort of story always (correctly) described as a classic of the genre, and which is invoked as an example of early urban horror. The thing that Mr Catesby Wran sees on the roof as he travels to and from work on the Chicago elevated railway is as terrible, amoral, and world-overturning as anything found in Barchester Cathedral or invoked by the unwise.

“Smoke Ghost” led off Leiber’s first collection Night’s Black Agents (1947), in which “The Hill and the Hole” (1942) was also reprinted. This is a very different story, with its inexplicable geological anomaly concealing a scarcely explained horror and fate for those who try to explore it. A warning for the curious indeed.

In Smoke Ghost, mystery magazines are often the sources for the stories, such as “The Power of the Puppets” (1942). It has a backstory, motivations, and happenings that Leiber continually leaves open to a series of non-supernatural (though hardly rational) explanations. His use of psychology, theatrics, and modern folklore must’ve made “The Power of the Puppets” a cut above the usual run of pulp magazine contributions.

“Cry Witch” (1951) contains another theme that resonates through Leiber’s fiction throughout his career -- the femme fatale. She has a life of her own that doesn’t seem to be quite natural, and which brings physical and/or psychical misfortune to the men who cross her path or who are drawn to her.

The one never-before published story included here is “The Enormous Bedroom”. A man wakes up in an unknown and yes, enormous, bedroom. And it is an enormous bedroom, and the situation gets weirder from there on in. The setting is eerie and surreal, and there is plenty of wry humour and satire. The nature of the enormous bedroom doesn’t come as any great surprise, but the journey there is an amusing and intriguing one.

“Black Glass” (1978) is late Leiber on top form, an evocative and meditative piece of modern myth-making. Autobiographical and confessional in tone, Leiber adopts his leisurely first-person persona, and achieves a genuine sense of reality. Wandering New York streets, the narrator finds himself captivated by a girl. Following and then losing her, he falls into conversation with a man in the subway who draws his attention to the growing amount of dirt and dust in the city. Ending up at the World Trade Center, he ascends one of the towers. As in the 1975 Nebula Award-winning story “Catch that Zeppelin!” the narrator’s ascent of a modern skyscraper is used as the way into a different world. At the top, at the end of a strange journey, the narrator meets the girl again, and sees the consequences of the “guck”. “Black Glass” combines a wistfulness of age with a fascination for the vitality of the young, and a human and humane warmth with cold blasts of terror from the future.

“I’m Looking for Jeff” drew the ire of James Blish (writing particularly waspishly as William Atheling Jr) after it had appeared in Fantastic in 1952. Blish objected to what he saw as Leiber’s crude attempt to muscle in on Mickey Spillane’s crime fiction territory. The story is a piece of noir fiction, B movie stuff, but a sharp shocker for all that. This time, another femme fatale has clearly had the “fatal” turned on her. We know it, everyone knows it except for the solitary drinker she entrances. The story is cliché, but as there has to be cliché, it may as well be like this.

“The Eeriest Ruined Dawn World” has had only one outing before, in Terry Carr’s anthology The Ides of Tomorrow (1976). A group of exploring aliens is visiting a planet devastated by rising sea levels. They find it to be empty of life except for one unusual entity, which Leiber (through the visitors) contrasts with the unusual entities who are the aliens.

After the previous two light-weight pieces, “Richmond, Late September, 1849” is another classic -- surprisingly reprinted only once since its first appearance in Fantastic in 1969. (Presumably it was just too late for inclusion by Sam Moskowitz in his marvellous anthology The Man Who Called Himself Poe.) The story is a moving and atmospheric meditation on Poe and the results of his gradual undoing by alcohol, on death, on meetings that can change a life. It probably isn’t too much to assume that Leiber was writing himself into one of his fictions -- the descriptions of an alcoholic writer’s failing powers (as he perceived them) and the haunting guilt of a dead wife and fading hope that another woman (femme fatale again!) would make all things well once more -- are deeply felt and communicated. Leiber opens a little window onto the enigma that was Edgar Allan Poe, and lets us see more of himself, too.

“The House of Mrs Delgato” first appeared in Rogue in 1959. Another minor piece, Leiber’s rather sharp and feline sense of humour grace what can only rightly be called a “shaggy cat” story.

“The Black Ewe” is a much stronger story, apparently (and inexplicably, unless Leiber grew to dislike it) never reprinted since its first appearance in Startling Stories in 1950. With the relief of someone whose life is like the brand plucked from eternal fire, Ken describes the reasons why he has broken off his engagement to Lavinia Simes. He explains the sequence of events and recalls the apparently innocuous (though odd) things that, with mounting unease, he had heard Lavinia say for as long as he had known her. She is another Leiberian “hungry” girl. This black ewe is deadlier than the male, and her exact nature -- which the narrator explicitly refers to as a horror -- echoes the postwar era of paranoia, suspicion, and fright of the future that was in the ascendant when the story was published.

“Replacement for Wilmer” is another minor but intriguing story. A group of boozy elderly men debate the whereabouts of one of their number after the funeral of their mutual friend Wilmer, and what they’ll do without him -- the annoying and irritating Wilmer. As the friends talk, a possible replacement starts to occur to them. Whether or not the subtitle “a ghost story” is any illumination, its shortness allows it to say more about friendship, habit, age, loss -- and drink -- than might at first seem apparent.

“Ms Found in a Maelstrom” (1959) enters one of Leiber’s recurring settings: the maelstrom of the driven mind. Why does the narrator so totally hate Richard Slade? He examines his motivations, dating back to childhood -- and uncovers probably the most human reason of all. And the twist-ending makes this story even more of a mercifully brief insight into a hurtful and hurting individual’s psychology.

“The Winter Flies” (also published as “The Inner Circles”) has been reprinted at least six times since it first appeared in 1967. Hardly surprising, because here Leiber’s “alcoholic memoirs” take on an unfortunate and funny life of their own. The narrator, Gottfried, known as “Gott” (!) spends his evenings trying to hide his drinking while protecting his wife and young son from attack by the hallucinations that regularly visit him at home after dinner. Gott fights them off with wordplay, but the enemy is not from outside of the situation. “The Winter Flies” represents the triumph -- at least temporarily -- of even a dysfunctional love over gathering guilt and chaos. Humorous and harrowing.

“The Button Molder” (1979) is very possibly Leiber’s single best story. It seems to sum-up Leiber’s career and outlook. Once again the concerns and experiences of an aging man living in the city -- one bounded not only by streets and open places, but by the universe Out There -- are intimately detailed by the narrator, who can effectively only be Fritz Leiber himself. Having moved to a new apartment, he begins writing an autobiographical testament, a philosophical meditation on life, people, history, the universe. No sooner has he made a start, than a series of odd experiences start to undermine his ease and sense of security and place. Even -- and particularly -- his hobby of rooftop astronomy seems to start wider trains of thought, and a note of cosmic terror intrudes into the hitherto quiet life of the new apartment. And then there are the “apparitions”…. The narrator’s whole view of his life, his career, his achievements are suddenly under threat, under reassessment, set against the skyward abyss of space -- and what and whatever else he thinks he might be under threat or observation from. Leiber’s great skill is not only to make this terrifying, but thought-provoking, fascinating with awe, even positive.

“Do You Know Dave Wenzel?” (1974) is reminiscent of “Ms Found in a Maelstrom”. Can anyone actually know Dave Wenzel? An old college friend of Don’s who reappears after many years, he is only ever spoken about but never met with, he has always just walked out of the room a moment before, and his phone calls are always taken by someone else. The reality of Dave Wenzel is always open to debate, and therefore his potential threat. Leiber makes this story into a tightly-constructed guessing-game, unsettling throughout, and leaving the situation that way. Who really was (and so could still be?) the threat is the question that lingers.

We are returned to noir territory for “A Visitor from Back East”, a mystery first published in 1961. Yet again Leiber shows his fascination with aspects of personality and close relationships, and the tricks that they can play. Although the story rationalises the ending, it remains a piece of grim humour that has something to say about sexuality and exploitation, and the revenge that can be unleashed when the worm finally turns.

The final story is another of Leiber’s very best. “Dark Wings” (1976) has a highly charged eroticism, with a gothic claustrophobia. Twin sisters, Rose and Violet, are reunited, and sit in Rose's apartment discussing their lives with their foster families, and their sexual experiences and sufferings. As he grew older Leiber felt able to explore issues of sexuality and psychology more and more openly in his fiction. A deceptively simple opening moves into the sisters’ realisation of their mutual lesbianism, and a discussion of how the male and female aspects of personality could manifest themselves, especially in twins with such experiences as theirs.

Terrified of the possibility of rape, Rose has had her apartment fitted with a multitude of locks, bars, and window shutters -- and has locked them both in. Throughout the evening they are constantly interrupted by what sounds like a bird trapped in the window shutter. Its flutterings and whirlings provide a background to the girls’ growing explorations of both body and mind. Leiber uses the trapped “bird” as a symbol of the dark side of sexuality trying to escape -- which of course it does, but as an intruder into the once secure apartment that Rose and Violet are now effectively prisoners in.

Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions is as sleek and elegant an apparition in black and silver as its predecessor. And inside -- Leiber! Marred only by thankfully fewer misprints than The Black Gondolier, there are still too many here for a book of this importance and price.

Smoke Ghost includes stories that should be known and cherished by everyone who wishes to enjoy the best of what the field of the fantastic has to offer -- and of Fritz Leiber’s unique place in it.

A slightly different version of this review apeared in All Hallows 31, 2002

Copyright (c) 2003 John Howard