Fresh from its original appearance in a limited edition from small press Midnight House, this collection follows the acclaimed title The Black Gondolier and Other Stories and is also edited by John Pelan and Steve Savile. Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions is a new collection of stories by Fritz Leiber. Assembled here is a selection of Mr. Leiber’s best horrific tales, many of which are previously uncollected and have been virtually unobtainable for decades. During his more than fifty years of writing, Leiber was an acknowledged master of the weird tale, and the stories in this collection include works originally published in the magazines from the 1940s onward, including such venues as Unknown, Thrilling Mystery, Startling Stories, and Fantasy, and also works published over the decades in such places as Rogue, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, and the acclaimed horror specialty magazine Whispers 13–14. Besides “Smoke Ghost” (1941), the stories include “Cry Witch!” (1951), “I’m Looking for Jeff” (1952), “Ms. Found in a Maelstrom” (1959), “The Button Molder” (1979), “Dark Wings” (1976), and “The Enormous Bedroom” (2001), which is original to this volume. While much of Leiber’s seminal science fiction and fantasy remain in print, his work in the field of supernatural horror has been sadly neglected until now.
Author
Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. was one of the more interesting of the young writers who came into HP Lovecraft's orbit, and some of his best early short fiction is horror rather than sf or fantasy. He found his mature voice early in the first of the sword-and-sorcery adventures featuring the large sensitive barbarian Fafhrd and the small street-smart-ish Gray Mouser; he returned to this series at various points in his career, using it sometimes for farce and sometimes for gloomy mood pieces—The Swords of Lankhmar is perhaps the best single volume of their adventures. Leiber's science fiction includes the planet-smashing The Wanderer in which a large cast mostly survive flood, fire, and the sexual attentions of feline aliens, and the satirical A Spectre is Haunting Texas in which a gangling, exo-skeleton-clad actor from the Moon leads a revolution and finds his true love. Leiber's late short fiction, and the fine horror novel Our Lady of Darkness, combine autobiographical issues like his struggle with depression and alcoholism with meditations on the emotional content of the fantastic genres. Leiber's capacity for endless self-reinvention and productive self-examination kept him, until his death, one of the most modern of his sf generation. Used These Alternate Names: Maurice Breçon, Fric Lajber, Fritz Leiber, Jr., Fritz R. Leiber, Fritz Leiber Jun., Фриц Лейбер, F. Lieber, フリッツ・ライバー
