The ancient Egyptians only buried people in their pyramids. We are living in ours." - Thibaut de Castries


Serialised in 1977, The Pale Brown Thing is a shorter version of Fritz Leiber's World Fantasy Award-winning novel of the supernatural, Our Lady of Darkness. Leiber maintained that the two texts "should be regarded as the same story told at different times", thus this volume reprints The Pale Brown Thing 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 fin de siecle 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.