The Pale Brown Thing

Cover image by Jason Zerrillo

"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 The Pale Brown Thing 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.


Contents

• "Thibaut de Castries, Revenant"
•     Donald Sidney-Fryer
•  
• "The Pale Brown Thing"
•     Fritz Leiber
•  
• "Story-telling Wonder-questing, Mortal Me:
• The Transformation of The Pale Brown Thing into Our Lady of Darkness"
•     John Howard
•  
• Acknowledgements

Limited hardcover sold out at the publisher

Numbered Limited - one of 100 (of the original production of 350 copies) with an embossed seal of the publisher on the title page with the limitaiton xx/100.and sold out at the publisher