"Fritz Leiber - Our Lady of Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

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Fritz Leiber




Our Lady of Darkness




Flyleaf:
Sometime during a three-year drunk in San Francisco, Franz Westen, a pulp author, bought two strange books. One was
Megapolisomancy тАФa "science of cities"тАФby the black magician and socialite Thibaut de Castries; the other an early journal of
Clark Ashton Smith, a writer of horror stories. As Westen tries to piece his life together, these books draw him to the ashes of a
wealthy, brilliant and degenerate bohemian cult, and to a grotesque living world of technological curses.
One morning, while examining the city through binoculars, Franz glimpses a priest-like dancing figure on a desolate hill.
Fascinated and vaguely horrified, he investigates. The hill is deserted but now he sees the faceless spectre across the city, in his
own apartment! Paranoia creeps over Franz; he knows intuitively that he has been selected by this entity. Somehow he must
break its hold over him. His two eerie books have the answers.
In Megapolisomancy Franz discovers an occult science of vicious demonsтАФ"paramental entities"тАФwho are intimately
related to urban design and engineering. And in the diary of Smith, a disciple of Thibaut de Castries, Franz sees the personalities of
the sorcerer and his circle. He goes back to the San Francisco of the 1900s and the Dionysian members of the Bohemian
ClubтАФJack London, the poets George Sterling and Nora May French, Earl Rogers, Gertrude Atherton, Ambrose Bierce. For a brief,
heady time, de Castries used these people in his paramental experiments.
Hounded through the city by ravenous ghosts and at the end of his wits, Franz finally confronts his curse, the embodiment
of the paramental force: Our Lady of Darkness.
 Fritz Leiber has written a subtle and elegant book. His realm is the arcane point where technology and mystery, science and
horror, meet. Our Lady of Darkness is a terrifying and ethereal work of science fiction.


An elder statesman of the literature of science fiction and fantasy, Fritz Leiber began publishing his works in the 30s and
became famous for his stories in Unknown and Astounding. He is the author of the classic novels Gather Darkness , Conjure Wife ,
The Wanderer , and The Big Time and winner of several Hugo awards.




But the third Sister, who is also the youngestтАФ! Hush! whisper whilst we talk of her! Her
kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers.
Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops
not; and her eyes, rising so high, might be hidden by distance. But, being what they are, they
cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she wears the fierce light of a
blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for
ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She
also is the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her