Lady of Darkness (Lady of Darkness Series Book 1)

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Fritz Leiber, despite being more widely known today for his science fiction and the sword and sorcery tales starring Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, was also one of the most original and important horror authors in the history of the genre. His short stories from the 40's, such as "Smoke Ghost," "The Dreams of Albert Moreland," and "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" -- along with his classic 1943 novel, Conjure Wife -- were groundbreaking, and cemented his status as the most influential American writer of horror and weird fiction in the post-Lovecraft 40's, paving the way for near-future greats like Bradbury, Beaumont, and Matheson. Whereas most supernatural fiction before Leiber was set in isolated places, he brought the paranormal into the streets of modern cities like Chicago and San Francisco, with some of the finest prose in speculative fiction. Even after Harlow failed at her secret little mission, they never once thought about leaving her unprotected. Did they make her pay? Yup and not even in the way you would think. After years of being comfortable in the silence Harlow surrounded herself in, she wasn’t prepared for THEIR silence. It was genius on their part. Despite being both English and Lords, their dialogue seems hardly British-English (the word lad was thrown in there once, just for the sake of trying I guess) and they sounded hardly upper class, let alone aristocrats. Generally they reminded me more of your average American thug to be honest. Again, this took away from any possibility of these books being immersive. Just have them call each other mate and you 'd already have done half the job. Had the author inserted words that the British upper class uses or talked about pronunciations and accents (which for the rich and aristocrats is usually quite distinct compared to lower classes), there would also have been some evidence of trying. But no. There was zero effort there. No research... again. The focus is still mostly on the characters, and what plot there is so vague I had honestly started to think there was something wrong with my comprehension skills.

I didn’t feel a whole lot of chemistry between the 2 love interests until the last 20% - but once it was there I got SUPER invested. Inner Circle (I don’t know why people insist on copying characters like Morrigan from ACOTAR when she has literally zero personality. 10 points to Hufflepuff for giving the “edgy, quiet” SPY guy ASH riding ((????)) powers instead of shadows though.) I'm just hoping that everything will become more clear in the next books or, at the very least, that last one. Megapolisomancy,” as its Classical roots suggest, is the practice of the particular form of magic which can unleash the power of a great metropolis. The inventor of the term, the fictional author Thibaut de Castries, maintains that the large concentrations of stone, concrete, and metal contained in such cities, combined with electricity and other fuels, constitute a great reservoir of energy which is organized by the grid pattern of the streets and heightened by the shapes and heights of particular buildings, which--properly manipulated--may evoke powerful occult forces. These forces, Westen suspects, are intensifying this very minute, and they are centered in his San Francisco neighborhood--perhaps in his very own apartment building. She is supposed to be strong and take no shit, yet lets the Assassin leader beat her...? Her loved ones are threatened and instead of being strong, building a plan and getting herself out, she walks herself to a cage and cries about it. Her friends are the one who do all the rescuing and saving.I loved this even more the second time! This world and these characters are some of my favorites of all time. But I'm left with two feelings that have little to do with the book's main themes. The first is my envy of the main character's daily routine (until it's interrupted by occult forces, that is): wake up in the morning and make coffee; work on short stories for publications with names like Weird Underground in accordance with your occupation as freelance writer of all manner of unconventional fiction; take a long hike through the hills of San Francisco; maintain an affair with a beautiful and intelligent harpsichordist who lives on the fourth floor of your apartment building; eat at a German restaurant with friends; play a couple of nearly silent games of chess in the evening with an acquaintance in the building with whom you don't share a language; then go to sleep and do it all again.

Lady of Shadows” is the second novel in the “Lady of Darkness” series and was released in 2021. Show me your darkness, and she’ll show you hers. The shadows are calling, and the stars are fading. The darkness threatens it all.A chosen that was never meant to be. Tessalyn Asura was just as forgotten as the realm. However when she finds herself being the personal Source to the Heir of the Endings, she ends up serving in the darkest Kingdom there is. The secrets inside of the Arius Kingdom are meant to be kept and learned, however this was never the life that she wanted. Fighting not just the fate that was thrust upon her, but also the temptation to lose herself to desire, Tessa is going to do anything to escape this new destiny. Until she begins realizing that their world was not nearly as forgotten as she believed, and she might be the reason why. The FMC, Scarlett, gets everything handed to her. All of the guys magically fall in love with her, all of the friends instantly become her bestie. She’s over dramatic, selfish, and everyone coddles her. When her friends try to tell her very obvious important things about her/her life that she’s too dumb to figure out she tells them to stop and she “can’t handle any new information right now”. But then she will get angry at them later when she finds out said things from a different source and accuses her friends of lying and hiding the truth. Like girl you are the reason they didn’t tell you. They wanted to tell you but you refused and now you’re gonna play the victim? Her personality is just awful and all over the place. One minute she’s “swaggering in with a cruel smile” the next she’s “stone cold and distant, retreated within herself because of the trauma”. So cringy and too much overuse of the same phrases. I was rolling my eyes at every other sentence.

So although I think the plot is great in this book, I would still consider this character driven. And it is slowwwwww. You need to be in the right mood for this to enjoy it. For me, it was exactly what I needed and I could not put it down., and I was so mad when it ended on a cliffy because I need more! I found this duo to be highly unorganized and frankly boring. In the first part of book one there is a section describing the Lords, it was very confusing because she was talking about 3 but there are 4 Lords. Throughout the books the Lords personalities were not differeniated alot making it hard to seperate them or even to get emotionally attached to the character. My changing feelings the entire time I read this book : I love it. I hate it. It's great. It's atrocious. The pace is fantastic. It's so slow, nothing is happening. Scarlett is a queen. Scarlett is the most annoying FMC. I never want this to end. Thank God it's over. I need the next one immediately. I don't want to continue this torture. Much of what made me what I am today was forged in darkness, and it is a darkness I do not entirely wish to leave.” Then at the end idk she has a literal psychotic break because Sorin has not had the chance to tell her every single thing about his past. If she trusts him so much she won't kill him, give the man the damn chance to explains things in time without the dramatics.

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The characters too are so unmistakably denizens of the pre-high tech Bay. The fey harpsichordist girlfriend; the co-tenants of ambiguous gender; the Peruvian concierge and her Americanised daughter; the lugubrious guru of occult wisdom; the autobiographical protagonist/writer himself are all distinctly of the place. Only the latter is consciously aware of it, but all are obsessed with its history, its topography, and its urban legends. They each come from somewhere else but have been entirely captivated and absorbed by its atmosphere of inherent strangeness. They do after all inhabit a crossroads between the dry, hot mission-country of the South and the cold, wet forests of the North. They sit on the Rim and on the Fault which act as a collection point for the entire Pacific. Humanity which is Ill-attached elsewhere slides or floats there - into a sort of enchanted sump.

Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. was one of the more interesting of the young writers who came into HP Lovecraft's orbit, and some of his best early short fiction is horror rather than sf or fantasy. He found his mature voice early in the first of the sword-and-sorcery adventures featuring the large sensitive barbarian Fafhrd and the small street-smart-ish Gray Mouser; he returned to this series at various points in his career, using it sometimes for farce and sometimes for gloomy mood pieces--The Swords of Lankhmar is perhaps the best single volume of their adventures. Leiber's science fiction includes the planet-smashing The Wanderer in which a large cast mostly survive flood, fire, and the sexual attentions of feline aliens, and the satirical A Spectre is Haunting Texas in which a gangling, exo-skeleton-clad actor from the Moon leads a revolution and finds his true love. Leiber's late short fiction, and the fine horror novel Our Lady of Darkness, combine autobiographical issues like his struggle with depression and alcoholism with meditations on the emotional content of the fantastic genres. Leiber's capacity for endless self-reinvention and productive self-examination kept him, until his death, one of the most modern of his sf generation. Well, as it turns out, no. 'Science-Fiction and Fantasy' often get lumped together by publishers and by large segments of the public. The unspoken third genre in this set is horror - unspoken perhaps because of slightly less overlap in readership? Nevertheless, many publishers do this lumping and the overlap in subject is plain from things like Ridley Scott's Alien on the one hand and the Cthulu mythos on the other. Perhaps urban fantasy and supernatural horror are particularly muddy waters as far as trying to separate one from another is concerned? To say any more would ruin the fun of experiencing the slow-building mystery that, while not exactly filled with blood-curdling terror, is stuffed with the sense of foreboding doom and unsettling, almost smothering atmosphere that Leiber began perfecting four decades earlier with the help of his semi-mentor and letters-correspondent, H.P. Lovecraft. Leiber, however, has a much more engaging style than ole' H.P., and I was totally unaware of the outside world while reading.

Customer reviews

She's honest, but she's also been broken too many times and it shows. I mean, she went through so much, so it's not surprising her personality took over. The couple and inner circle go out to the city for dinner and dancing where she gets to know him more Sorin is so far my favourite character. He's everything I love in a love interest, and I can't wait to read more about him. And i am suddenly so bored of this book and review and im done with it. Thank you for reading if everyone ever reads this chaotic “review” of mine. Let’s start with the positives, I liked the world building, the stories of the different realms and how they all ended up sequestered, the fae queens and the different magical lands etc it was all very intriguing.