Conjure Wife

by Fritz Leiber, Travis D. Johnson (Editor), Ramsey Campbell (Introduction)

Norman Saylor is a successful sociology professor-rational, skeptical, and devoted to empirical truth. When he discovers his wife Tansy has been practicing witchcraft to protect him, he demands she stop and destroy her charms. But Tansy's magic was real, and with her protections gone, Norman finds himself targeted by forces that move through faculty politics and suburban rituals. To survive, he must accept what his rationalism beneath the mundane surface of academic life, a hidden war is being waged-and the women have always held the real power.

Fritz Leiber's first novel, Conjure Wife remains one of the twentieth century's most important works of supernatural horror-a foundational text by a writer who influenced everyone from Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison to Kelly Link and George R.R. Martin.

261 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1943

About the 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

Reviews

[Angela Brandt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was highly entertaining... especially for me since horror & fantasy is not my usual choice of reading. However, I found this book to be quite witty with characters that were so easy to relate to. Tansy is adorable! As for Norman, the good professor, he is an extraordinary, patient husband who never gives up on his witchy wife.

[Joanna Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stranger kind of Stepford wives.... A must read for anyone who enjoys masterful storytelling! A gripping, quick read.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally published on my Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/zachgeo...

With Conjure Wife, Fritz Leiber took horror out of the pulps, away from the baroque, gothic, and cosmic, and brought it to American suburbia. Without Leiber there would have been no Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, Stephen King, etc. It’s also the source novel for the masterpiece of supernatural skepticism and terror, Night of the Eagle. The novel is more uneven than the film, especially presented here in its original text, but there’s something so invigorating and absorbing about it that makes it greater than the sum of its individual parts. And the novel goes into more detail about how the world of witchcraft belongs to the world of women, and how ancient knowledge is passed down and used in the modern world. There are some very genuinely creepy moments in here, too, that recall the voodoo zombie film cycle of the 1930s and 40s.

DISCLAIMER: My friend Travis D. Johnson, owner of Frolic Press, sent me a free EPUB of this in exchange for an honest review.

[Ivy Grimes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love delving into the history of a genre, and this is my first foray into the works of Fritz Leiber, an early Weird/speculative writer. There's something really terrifying about Conjure Wife that reminds me of Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown. In some ways, this novel is a twist on the idea of a Lady Macbeth, an overly ambitious wife (mixed with the Weird Sisters), with the idea that the women use witchery not only for promotions, but to protect themselves and loved ones from great danger. Fantastic cover! I'm looking forward to seeing what else appears in the collection of classics from Frolic Press. 

[Travis Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I edited this edition, so I'll just use an excerpt from my introduction for this review:

I first encountered Leiber at nineteen, reading "Gonna Roll the Bones" in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions. I had already read widely in the literature of the dark and strange by then, but here was something utterly unique—a voice that wedded surreal terror to a streetwise vernacular I hadn't encountered before. I became an avid reader of Leiber. When I founded Frolic Press this year, there was no question in my mind as to what our inaugural title would be.