Fritz Leiber (1910– 1992) was an influential, award-winning American writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction. H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Graves, and Carl Jung all helped inspire his fiction. Although perhaps best-known for the swords-and-sorcery Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, Leiber also wrote several sui generis macabre novels and stories. Our Lady of Darkness (1977) is among the best-known of his horror novels and, like much of his later fiction, includes autobiography by way of his real-life struggles with depression and alcoholism. Along with such novels, stories like ‘The Girl with the Hungry Eyes’ (1949) and the classic reprinted in The Weird, ‘Smoke Ghost’ (1941), made Leiber a key forerunner of the urban weird of writers like Ramsey Campbell. In this latest installment of 101 Weird Writers, returning contributor Elwin Cotman pays tribute to Leiber and “Smoke Ghost,” documenting the strange, haunting power of both.
Read more at Weird Fiction Review.
Gothic Menagerie 