The Pale Brown Thing

<p><em>The ancient Egyptians only buried people in their pyramids. We are living in ours.</em> - Thibaut de Castries</p><p><br></p><p> Serialised in 1977 <em>The Pale Brown Thing</em> is a shorter version of Fritz Leiber's World Fantasy Award-winning novel of the supernatural <em>Our Lady of Darkness</em>. Leiber maintained that the two texts should be regarded as the same story told at different times; thus this volume reprints <em>The Pale Brown Thing</em> 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 <em>fin de siecle</em> 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.</p>