Our Lady of Darkness

Franz Westen writes weird tales for a living and lives in an old apartment house in San Francisco. His wife, Daisy, is dead, and he is climbing out of three years of drinking with the help of Cal, a young harpsichordist whose music steadies him. On the bed beside him, where his wife used to sleep, he has piled books and magazines in something like the shape of a woman, and he calls the heap his Scholar's Mistress. In a used bookstore he finds two strange volumes: Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities, by one Thibaut de Castries, and a journal he believes belonged to the real writer Clark Ashton Smith, recording Smith's meetings with de Castries.

De Castries taught that great masses of steel and concrete breed paramental entities, beings that feed on the cities around them. One day, looking through binoculars at the bare hill of Corona Heights, Franz sees a pale brown figure dancing there and waving at him. When he climbs the hill and looks back, the figure is waving from his own window. Franz's investigation leads into the city's literary past, through Jack London, Ambrose Bierce and George Sterling, and he decodes a cipher showing that de Castries set a trap, meant for Smith, that has waited decades to spring. At the climax the Scholar's Mistress comes alive and attacks him, and Cal arrives just in time to drive it out by calling on the names of musicians and scientists, the powers of order and harmony. Franz and Cal move to another apartment together, and do not marry.

The book moves slowly, through walks, conversations and old books, and the dread arrives in small increments. Much of its pleasure is San Francisco itself, its hills, streets and literary ghosts. Not every reader was won over: Kirkus called it "a sorry performance" and complained of loose ends. Readers who like M. R. James, Shirley Jackson or books about books will find a great deal here.