Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber
The classic novel of urban horror by SFWA's 5th Grand Master
A novel of 'quiet horror' that's been filmed with actors such as Lon Chaney in the 1944 Weird Woman and Peter Wyngarde in the Charles Beaumont-scripted Night of the Eagle
Fritz Leiber's first novel Conjure Wife was published in 1943, but it is still as good as anything published today. It's part of a double bill called Dark Ladies, (ISBN978-0312869724, 352pp) and is reviewed here.
Fritz Leiber,jnr.Fritz Reuter Leiber had been married for several years when he graduated from short stories such as the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories to writing novel-length masterpieces such as this campus-bound tale of modern urban magic. With it's urbane domesticity setting it apart from the majority of contemporaries, Conjure Wife is very much of the 'quiet horror' school, and starts deceptively quietly, with a husband snooping through his wife's possessions. It was a great start to a long, distinguished career that would eventually see Leiber become the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA)'s 5th Grand Master.
Conjure Wife
One of Leiber's recurring themes is that women secretly run the world while posing as the 'weaker' sex, yet Professor Norman Saylor believes no such thing when the novel opens on the campus of Hempnell College, a small New England university replete with petty ambitions for tenure, overwrought adolescent girls, and scheming wives all contributing to a pressure-cooker atmosphere.
But part of the chill that Leiber immediately conjures is that everything in Saylor's world is roseate -- even his wife Tansy, has managed to settle into and now thrives in what was an initially unwelcoming atmosphere, and Leiber painstakingly details just how wonderful their life is as Saylor idly snoops through his wife's possessions, and finds boxes of dirt, which from his anthropoligical background he recognizes as necessary for the conjure-magic of the novel's title. It is this overwhelming catalogue of how wonderful life is that paradoxically sends a chill down the reader's spine; when things are this good, Leiber seems to be saying, there's only one way things can go from here - downhill.
Weird WomanAt first Saylor is unwilling to believe that his wife is anything but neurotic, and he gently but firmly insists that she burns the fetishes. He immediately notices a changed environment, although for a long while he acts in denial, and refuses to believe the string of minor accidents that befall him to be anything but coincidence.
But when Tansy disappears, Norman is forced to act, and must slowly surely cast aside his initial scepticicsm and embrace what he considered the impossible only a few days earlier, and go after the weird woman that his wife has turned out to be.
Which Witch is Witch?
Key to the end of the novel is the disassociation from the body of the soul, and Leiber begins to work on the implications of this, playing a final shell game with the identities of the women, Leiber also does a fine job of providing pseudo-scientific rationales for many superstitions and magical acts.
As early as a year after Conjure Wife's 1943 publication, the novel was filmed as Weird Woman, starring Lon Chaney, and two more versions followed, the best known being the Charles Beaumont-scripted Night of the Eagle from 1962, (also known as Burn, Witch, Burn!) which featured Peter Wyngarde, and finally the utterly forgettable Witches' Brew (also known as Which Witch is Which?)
