"The ancient Egyptians only buried people in their pyramids. We are living in ours."
- Thibaut de Castries
Serialised in 1977,
The Pale Brown Thing
is a shorter version of Fritz Leiber's World Fantasy Award-winning novel of the supernatural,
Our Lady of Darkness
. Leiber maintained that the two texts "should be regarded as the same story told at different times"; thus this volume reprints
for the first time in nearly forty years, with an introduction by the author's friend, Californian poet Donald Sidney-Fryer. The novella stands as Leiber's vision of 1970s San Francisco: a city imbued with an eccentric vibe and nefarious entities, in which pulp writer Franz Westen uncovers an alternate portrait of the city's
fin de siecle
literary set-Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Clark Ashton Smith-as well as the darker invocations of occultist Thibaut de Castries and a pale brown inhabitant of Corona Heights.