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60-504: The story is a sequel to " The Shambler from the Stars " by Robert Bloch . Bloch wrote a third story in the sequence, " The Shadow from the Steeple ", in 1950. In Providence , Robert Blake, a young writer with an interest in the occult , becomes fascinated by a large disused church on Federal Hill which he can see from his lodgings on the city's east side. His research reveals that the church has

120-528: A 'Transition', and two grouped as 'Ancient Adventures': "The Sunken Land" and "Adept's Gambit", which are both stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. The science fiction novel Gather, Darkness followed in 1950. It deals with a futuristic world that follows the Second Atomic Age which is ruled by scientists, until in the throes of a new Dark Age, the witches revolt. In 1951, Leiber was Guest of Honor at

180-627: A brief, intense correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft , who "encouraged and influenced [Leiber's] literary development" before Lovecraft died in March 1937. Leiber introduced Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in "Two Sought Adventure", his first professionally published short story in the August 1939 edition of Unknown , edited by John W. Campbell . Leiber married Jonquil Stephens on January 16, 1936. Their only child, philosopher and science fiction writer Justin Leiber ,

240-450: A discussion of Lovecraft's work, Fritz Leiber described the "Haunter of the Dark" as "one of his finer tales (and his last)". The horror historian R. S. Hadji included "The Haunter of the Dark" on his list of the most frightening horror stories. The Robert Bloch Award is presented at the annual Necronomicon convention. Its recipient in 2013 was editor and scholar S. T. Joshi . The award is in

300-785: A fallow interregnum from 1954 to 1956), his output (including the 1947 Arkham House anthology Night's Black Agents ) was characterized by Poul Anderson as "a lot of the best science fiction and fantasy in the business". In 1958, the Leibers returned to Los Angeles. By then, he could afford to relinquish his journalistic career and support his family as a full-time fiction writer. Jonquil's death in 1969 precipitated Leiber's permanent relocation to San Francisco and exacerbated his longstanding alcoholism after twelve years of fellowship in Alcoholics Anonymous . He gradually regained sobriety, an effort impeded by comorbid barbiturate abuse, over

360-407: A fantasy novel set in modern-day San Francisco, Our Lady of Darkness , which is about a writer of weird tales who must deal with the death of his wife and his recovery from alcoholism. In 1992, the last year of his life, Leiber married his second wife, Margo Skinner, a journalist and poet with whom he had been friends for years. Leiber died a few weeks after a physical collapse while traveling from

420-509: A science fiction convention in London, Ontario , with Skinner. His cause of death was a stroke. He wrote a 100-page-plus memoir, Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex , which can be found in The Ghost Light (1984). Leiber's own literary criticism, including several essays on Lovecraft, was collected in the volume Fafhrd and Me (1990). As the child of two Shakespearean actors, Leiber

480-542: A seedy San Francisco residence hotel , its squalor relieved mainly by walls of books". Other reports suggest that Leiber preferred to live simply in the city, spending his money on dining, movies, and travel. In the last years of his life, royalty checks from TSR, Inc. (the makers of Dungeons & Dragons , who had licensed the mythos of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series) were enough in themselves to ensure that he lived comfortably. In 1977, he returned to his original form with

540-497: A single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment." An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia suggests that this interpretation is the key to understanding the ending of "The Haunter of the Dark": "[W]e are to believe that the entity in the church--the Haunter of the Dark, described as an avatar of Nyarlathotep--has possessed Blake's mind but, at the moment of doing so, is struck by lightning and killed, and Blake dies as well." In

600-481: A sinister history involving a cult called the Church of Starry Wisdom and is dreaded by the local migrant inhabitants as being haunted by a primordial evil. Blake enters the church and ascends the tower, where he discovers the skeleton of Edwin M. Lillibridge, a reporter who disappeared in 1893. He also discovers an ancient stone artifact known as the "Shining Trapezohedron " which has the property of being able to summon

660-469: A spider pencilled large in black on his forehead, thus turning him into an officer of the Spiders, one of the combatants in his Change War stories. "The only other component," Merril writes, "was the Leiber instinct for theatre." The similarity of the names of the father and the son caused some filmographies to incorrectly attribute to Fritz Jr. roles which were in fact played by his father, Fritz Leiber Sr., who

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720-602: A story which became "The Tunneler Below" and finally "The Terror from the Depths" (in Disciples of Cthulhu Cthulhu Mythos anthology ). Robert M. Price has also used the title "The Burrower Beneath" for a story set in the Eibonic mythos of Clark Ashton Smith —see Price's anthology The Book of Eibon (Chaosium, 2002). Leigh Blackmore 's poem "The Conjuration" (in his collection Spores from Sharnoth and Other Madnesses , P'rea Press, 2008)

780-425: A terrible being from the depths of time and space. The trapezohedron rests in a metal box with a hinged lid; the box is incised with designs representing living but distinctly alien creatures. The whole sits atop a column which is also incised with alien designs or characters. Blake's interference inadvertently summons the malign being of the title, and he flees the church. The being can only go abroad in darkness, and

840-747: A third story, "The Shadow from the Steeple" ( 1950 ), to create a trilogy. Several of the surface details of the plot were taken directly from Hanns Heinz Ewers ' "The Spider", which Lovecraft read in Dashiell Hammett 's anthology Creeps By Night (1931). In Blake's final notes, he refers to "Roderick Usher", an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe 's " The Fall of the House of Usher ", which Lovecraft described in " Supernatural Horror in Literature " as featuring "an abnormally linked trinity of entities...a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing

900-410: Is hence constrained to the tower at night by the presence of the lights of the city. However, when the city's electrical power is weakened during a thunderstorm, the local people are terrified by the sounds coming from the church and call on their Catholic priests to lead prayers against the demon. Blake, aware of what he has let loose, also prays for the power to remain on. However, an outage occurs and

960-424: Is mentioned in "The Haunter of the Dark" as a planet more distant from Earth than Yuggoth ; this may suggest that Blake's writing of a story with that title is a foreshadowing of his mental link with the 'Haunter', which Blake believes to be an avatar of Nyarlathotep . Brian Lumley borrowed the title The Burrowers Beneath for his first novel (1974). Fritz Leiber also used the title "The Burrower Beneath" for

1020-527: Is one of the fathers of sword and sorcery . Fritz Leiber was born December 24, 1910, in Chicago, Illinois , to the actors Fritz Leiber and Virginia Bronson Leiber. For a time, he seemed inclined to follow in his parents' footsteps; the theater and actors feature in his fiction. He spent 1928 touring with his parents' Shakespeare company (Fritz Leiber & Co.) before entering the University of Chicago , where he

1080-819: Is referred to in Ramsey Campbell 's "The Franklyn Paragraphs" (1973) and Philip José Farmer 's "The Freshman" (1979). Lovecraft's tale names five stories written by Robert Blake: "The Burrowers Beneath"; "Shaggai"; "The Stairs in the Crypt"; "In the Vale of Pnath" and "The Feaster from the Stars" which as Robert M. Price has pointed out are friendly spoofs of tales written by Robert Bloch (for more info see Price's anthology The Book of Eibon (Chaosium, 2002, p. 191)). Author Lin Carter wrote stories which are pastiches of either Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith utilising all five titles. Shaggai

1140-623: The Necronomicon and Book of Eibon . Soon afterwards, the narrator mails letters to various libraries, universities, and occult practitioners, hoping to secure the desired volumes. However, he is only met with both hostility and threats of violence. Undeterred, he then personally begins searching various bookstores around his hometown. At first, he again meets with disappointment, but his perseverance eventually pays off and, in an old shop on South Dearborn Street, he succeeds in obtaining an occult volume known as De Vermis Mysteriis , which he knows

1200-652: The Horror Writers Association made him an inaugural winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1988 (named in 1987); and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in 2001, its sixth class of two deceased and two living writers. Leiber was a founding member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loose-knit group of Heroic fantasy authors founded in

1260-696: The Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1970 and 1971 for "Ship of Shadows" (1969) and " Ill Met in Lankhmar " (1970). " Gonna Roll the Bones " (1967), his contribution to Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology, won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 1968. Our Lady of Darkness (1977), originally serialized in short form in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction under

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1320-600: The "Best Novella" Hugo and Nebula Awards. Leiber's last major work, The Knight and Knave of Swords (1991), closed out the series while leaving room for possible sequels. In his last year, Leiber considered allowing other writers to continue the series, but his sudden death made this more difficult. One new Fafhrd and the Mouser novel, Swords Against the Shadowland , by Robin Wayne Bailey , appeared in 1998. The stories influenced

1380-886: The 1960s and led by Lin Carter . Some works by SAGA members were published in Lin Carter 's Flashing Swords! anthologies. Leiber himself is credited with inventing the term sword and sorcery for the particular subgenre of epic fantasy exemplified by his Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories. In an appreciation in the July 1969 "Special Fritz Leiber Issue" of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , Judith Merril writes of Leiber's connection with his readers: "That this kind of personal response...is shared by thousands of other readers, has been made clear on several occasions." The November 1959 issue of Fantastic , for instance: Leiber had just come out of one of his recurrent dry spells, and editor Cele Lalli bought up all his new material until there

1440-717: The 1966 novelization of the Clair Huffaker screenplay of Tarzan and the Valley of Gold . Many of Leiber's most acclaimed works are short stories, especially in the horror genre, including "The Smoke Ghost", "The Girl With the Hungry Eyes", and "You're All Alone" (later expanded as The Sinful Ones ). Leiber also challenged the conventions of science fiction through reflexive narratives such as "A Bad Day For Sales" (first published in Galaxy Science Fiction , July 1953), in which

1500-403: The 1979 Schick Sunn Classics documentary The Bermuda Triangle , based on the book by Charles Berlitz . Leiber was heavily influenced by H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Graves , John Webster , and Shakespeare in the first two decades of his career. Beginning in the late 1950s, he was increasingly influenced by the works of Carl Jung , particularly by the concepts of the anima and the shadow . In

1560-460: The Gray Mouser. In 1943, his first two novels were serialized in Unknown (the supernatural horror-oriented Conjure Wife , inspired by his experiences on the faculty of Occidental College) and Astounding Science Fiction ( Gather, Darkness ). 1947 marked the publication of his first book, Night's Black Agents , a short story collection containing seven stories grouped as 'Modern Horrors', one as

1620-759: The University of Chicago from 1933 to 1934 and again not taking a degree, he remained in Chicago while touring under the stage name of "Francis Lathrop" intermittently with his parents' company and pursuing a literary career. Six short stories later included in the 2010 collection Strange Wonders: A Collection of Rare Fritz Leiber Works carry 1934 and 1935 dates. He also appeared alongside his father in uncredited parts in George Cukor 's Camille (1936), James Whale 's The Great Garrick (1937), and William Dieterle 's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). In 1936, he initiated

1680-654: The World Science Fiction Convention in New Orleans. Further novels followed during the 1950s, and in 1958 The Big Time won the Hugo Award for Best Novel . Leiber continued to publish in the 1960s. His novel The Wanderer (1964) also won the Hugo for Best Novel. In the novel, an artificial planet nicknamed the Wanderer materializes from hyperspace within earth's orbit. The Wanderer's gravitational field captures

1740-449: The action takes place in a small bubble of isolated space-time the size of a theatrical stage, and with only a handful of characters. Judith Merril (in the July 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction ) remarks on Leiber's acting skills when the writer won a science fiction convention costume ball. Leiber's costume consisted of a cardboard military collar over turned-up jacket lapels, cardboard insignia, an armband, and

1800-502: The award-winning "The Button Moulder". The short parallel worlds story " Catch That Zeppelin! " (1975) won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story and the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1976. It presents an alternate reality much better than our own, as opposed to the usual parallel universe story depicting a world worse than our own. "Belsen Express" (1975) won the World Fantasy Award—Short Fiction . Leiber

1860-425: The being flies towards Blake's quarters. He is subsequently found dead, staring out of his window at the church with a look of horror on his face. His last words refer to his perception of the approaching being: "I see it-- coming here-- hell-wind-- titan-blur-- black wings-- Yog-Sothoth save me-- the three-lobed burning eye..." His death is put down to a lightning strike, and a superstitious local doctor later removes

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1920-777: The box containing the Shining Trapezohedron from the church and throws it into the Narragansett Bay . Robert Harrison Blake is a fictional horror writer who first appears, unnamed, in Robert Bloch's 1935 story " The Shambler from the Stars ". In Lovecraft's sequel, Blake dies while investigating the Starry Wisdom cult of Enoch Bowen. Lovecraft modeled Blake on Bloch, but also gave him characteristics that evoke Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft himself. Lovecraft indicated in his letters with then-young writer Robert Bloch , that

1980-429: The character Robert Blake was an intentionally thinly veiled gesture at killing off one of his friendly correspondents. In 1936, Bloch published a story that continued the professional fun, in which Blake did not actually die, but was possessed by Nyarlathotep, and kills off a character based on Lovecraft. Blake's death is the starting point for another sequel by Bloch, "The Shadow from the Steeple" (1950). Blake's fiction

2040-467: The city of Lankhmar . Fafhrd was based on Leiber himself and the Mouser on his friend Harry Otto Fischer , and the two characters were created in a series of letters exchanged by the two in the mid-1930s. These stories were among the progenitors of many of the tropes of sword and sorcery . Some Fafhrd and Mouser stories were recognized by annual genre awards: "Scylla's Daughter" (1961) was "Short Story" Hugo finalist, and "Ill Met in Lankhmar" (1970) won

2100-422: The city of Tyre a hundred years later, where the two visitors from Nehwon are remembered as local legends. Fischer and Leiber contributed to the original design of the 1976 wargame Lankhmar from TSR . Conjure Wife has been made into feature films four times under other titles: "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" was filmed under that title by Kastenbaum Films in 1995. (This film is not to be confused with

2160-435: The craft are woefully inadequate and rejected by magazine editors. As a result, he begins to yearn after the forbidden knowledge known only to those who are true practitioners of the occult , and begins sending letters of correspondence to various thinkers and dreamers from all over the country. One man in particular, a "mystic dreamer" from New England , tells him of the existence of certain nameless and forbidden tomes such as

2220-421: The creature continues to feed, it slowly becomes more and more visible until its monstrous form is fully revealed. Upon witnessing the fully visible "shambler from the stars," the narrator goes mad. After the creature retreats back into the nameless cosmic gulfs whence it had come, the book mysteriously vanishes and the narrator wanders out into the streets, shortly after setting his own friend's house on fire. While

2280-433: The cult horror film Equinox (1970) directed by Dennis Muren and Jack Woods, Leiber has a cameo appearance as a geologist, Dr. Watermann. In the edited second version of the movie, Leiber has no spoken dialogue but appears in a few scenes. The original version of the movie has a longer appearance by Leiber recounting the ancient book and a brief speaking role; all were cut from the re-release. He also appears as Chavez in

2340-493: The forbidden tome De Vermis Mysteriis (Mysteries of the Worm). Later on in 1935, Lovecraft wrote the short story " The Haunter of the Dark " as a sequel and dedicated it to Bloch. Eventually, in 1950, Bloch wrote his own sequel " The Shadow from the Steeple ". The story focuses on a nameless narrator who, in addition to being a college student, hopes to make a living as a pulp writer of weird fiction . His earliest efforts at

2400-455: The human protagonist yet repelled by human customs in the novel The Wanderer . Leiber's "Gummitch" stories feature a kitten with an I.Q. of 160, just waiting for his ritual cup of coffee so that he can become human, too. His first stories in the 1930s and 40s were inspired by Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos . A notable critic and historian of the wider Mythos, S. T. Joshi, has singled out Leiber's "The Sunken Land" ( Unknown Worlds , February 1942) as

2460-402: The inscription out loud, and immediately afterwards, the room turns dreadfully cold, and an unearthly wind rushes in through the window, followed by a hideous laughter, which heralds the arrival of an invisible vampiric monstrosity: a star vampire. Suddenly, the monster lifts the mystic into the air, and begins feeding off of his blood until he is nothing more than a wrinkled, flabby corpse . As

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2520-410: The mid-1960s, he began incorporating elements of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces . These concepts are often mentioned in his stories, especially the anima, which becomes a method of exploring his fascination with, but estrangement from, the female. Leiber liked cats, which are featured in many of his stories. Tigerishka, for example, is a cat-like alien who is sexually attractive to

2580-496: The moon and shatters it into something like one of Saturn's rings. On Earth, the Wanderer's gravity well triggers earthquakes, tsunamis, and tidal phenomena. The multi-threaded plot follows the exploits of an ensemble cast as they struggle to survive the global disaster. In the same period, Leiber published "Black Gondolier", a short story in which a protagonist uncovers a cosmic conspiracy in which oil from ancient fossils preys upon human beings and human civilizations. Leiber received

2640-447: The most accomplished of the early stories based on Lovecraft's Mythos. Leiber also later wrote several essays on Lovecraft the man, such as "A Literary Copernicus" (1949), the publication of which formed a key moment in the emergence of a serious critical appreciation of Lovecraft's life and work. Leiber's first professional sale was "Two Sought Adventure" ( Unknown , August 1939), which introduced his most famous characters, Fafhrd and

2700-417: The narrator struggles to move on from his ordeal, he still subconsciously fears that the shambler from the stars will one day return for him. Fritz Leiber Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. ( / ˈ l aɪ b ər / LY -bər ; December 24, 1910 – September 5, 1992) was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. With writers such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock , Leiber

2760-417: The next two decades. Perhaps as a result of his substance abuse , Leiber seems to have suffered periods of penury in the 1970s; Harlan Ellison wrote of his anger at finding that the much-awarded Leiber had to write his novels on a manual typewriter propped up over the sink in his apartment. Marc Laidlaw wrote that, when visiting Leiber as a fan in 1976, he "was shocked to find him occupying one small room of

2820-410: The protagonist, Robie, "America’s only genuine mobile salesrobot", references the title character of Isaac Asimov's idealistic robot story, "Robbie". Questioning Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics , Leiber imagines the futility of automatons in a post-apocalyptic New York City. In his later years, Leiber returned to short story horror in such works as "Horrible Imaginings", "Black Has Its Charms" and

2880-524: The shape of the Shining Trapezohedron. The Shambler from the Stars (Short Story) "The Shambler from the Stars" is a horror short story by American writer Robert Bloch , first published in the September 1935 issue of Weird Tales . It was later included as part of his first published book, The Opener of the Way (1945), and his 1994 collection The Early Fears . A Cthulhu Mythos tale, it introduced

2940-746: The shaping of sword and sorcery and other works. Joanna Russ ' stories about thief-assassin Alyx (collected in 1976 in The Adventures of Alyx ) were in part inspired by Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and Alyx made guest appearances in two of Leiber's stories. More recently, playing off the visit of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser to our world in Adept's Gambit (set in second century B.C. Tyre), Steven Saylor 's short story "Ill Seen in Tyre" takes his Roma Sub Rosa series hero Gordianus to

3000-480: The struggle against fascism mattered more than his long-held pacifist convictions. He accepted a position with Douglas Aircraft in quality inspection, primarily working on the C-47 Skytrain . Throughout the war, he continued to regularly publish fiction. Thereafter, the family returned to Chicago, where Leiber served as associate editor of Science Digest from 1945 to 1956. During this decade (forestalled by

3060-554: The title "The Pale Brown Thing" (1977), featured cities as the breeding grounds for new types of elementals called paramentals, summonable by the dark art of megapolisomancy , with such activities centering on the Transamerica Pyramid . Its main characters include Franz Westen, Jaime Donaldus Byers, and the magician Thibault de Castries. Our Lady of Darkness won the World Fantasy Award—Novel . Leiber also wrote

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3120-407: The volume, but eventually does so upon the narrator's insistence. While perusing the book, the mystic inadvertently stumbles across a spell or invocation on a chapter dealing with familiars which he believes to be a summoning towards one of the invisible "star-sent servants" spoken of in the frightful stories surrounding Prinn. Foolishly, the narrator makes no attempt to stop the mystic from reading

3180-551: Was born in 1938. From 1937 to 1941, Fritz Leiber was employed by Consolidated Book Publishing as a staff writer for the Standard American Encyclopedia . In 1941, the family moved to California, where Leiber served as a speech and drama instructor at Occidental College during the 1941–1942 academic year. Unable to conceal his disdain for academic politics as the United States entered World War II , he decided that

3240-595: Was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received an undergraduate Ph.B. degree in psychology and physiology or biology with honors in 1932. From 1932 to 1933, he worked as a lay reader and studied as a candidate for the ministry, without taking a degree, at the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea, Manhattan , an affiliate of the Episcopal Church . After pursuing graduate studies in philosophy at

3300-506: Was enough [five stories] to fill an issue; the magazine came out with a big black headline across its cover — Leiber Is Back! His legacy has been consolidated by his most famous creations, the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, written over a span of 50 years. The first, "Two Sought Adventure", appeared in Unknown , August 1939. The stories are about an unlikely pair of heroes found in and around

3360-459: Was fascinated with the stage, describing itinerant Shakespearean companies in stories like "No Great Magic" and "Four Ghosts in Hamlet", and creating an actor/producer protagonist for his novel A Specter is Haunting Texas . Although his Change War novel, The Big Time , is about a war between two factions, the "Snakes" and the "Spiders", changing and rechanging history throughout the universe, all

3420-549: Was inspired by the title "The Feaster from the Stars". Blackmore's story "The Stairs in the Crypt" (not to be confused with Lin Carter's story of the same title) was also inspired by the name of Robert Blake's tale. Lovecraft wrote this tale as a reply to " The Shambler from the Stars " ( 1935 ) by Robert Bloch, in which Bloch kills the Lovecraft-inspired character. Lovecraft returned the favor in this tale, killing off Robert Harrison Blake (aka Robert Bloch). Bloch later wrote

3480-529: Was named the second Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy by participants in the 1975 World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), after the posthumous inaugural award to J. R. R. Tolkien . Next year he won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement . He was Guest of Honor at the 1979 Worldcon in Brighton, England (1979). The Science Fiction Writers of America made him its fifth SFWA Grand Master in 1981;

3540-590: Was the evil Inquisitor in the Errol Flynn adventure film The Sea Hawk (1940) and had played in many other movies from 1917 to the late 1950s. It is the elder Leiber, not the younger, who appears in the Vincent Price vehicle The Web (1947) and in Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947). The younger Leiber can be seen briefly as Valentin in the 1936 film version of Camille starring Greta Garbo . In

3600-559: Was written by a Belgian sorcerer named Ludvig Prinn, who was burned at the stake during the witchcraft trials . Finding it to be written entirely in Latin , and not being able to speak the language, he once again contacts the New England mystic, who agrees to aid him in translation. The narrator travels to his home in Providence , Rhode Island , where the mystic is initially hesitant to even open

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