The Pale Brown Thing

Dublin: Swan River Press, 2016. First edition, Hardcover, SIGNED, Limited, Fine in Fine dust jacket,. Jason Zerrillo. Dublin: Swan River Press:, 2016. First edition, Hardcover, SIGNED, Limited, Fine in Fine dust jacket, 143 pp.<br/> Cover artwork by: Jason Zerrillo Signed on the half-title page by Donald Sydney-Fryer, who provides the introduction. "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."