Fritz Leiber: Critical Essays

Asserting that the modern consciousness evident in the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories was a departure from the stereotypical heroic fantasy and an indirect harbinger of modernization, Joshi explores subsequent non-traditional gothic elements that are exploited in early works like "The Automatic Pistol" and "The Hound" and that reach their culmination in classics such as "Smoke Ghost" and Conjure Wife, He concludes that Leiber "is largely responsible in rescuing the supernatural tale from irrelevance in an age of factories, advertising, and atom bombs; it was he who showed that these very elements of modernity could themselves serve as the sources of new supernatural traditions and would carry the weird tale into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries" (129). [...]in "He Wrote in the Valley of the Shadow of Death: Deconstructing Gather, Darkness! [...]the collection would benefit from an extensive proofreading to eliminate occasional typos and misspellings.