Review: "Smoke Ghost" by Fritz Leiber, Jr.

This 15-page short story originally appeared in the October 1941 issue of Unknown Worlds. The author, Fritz Leiber, had just a few years before entered his first phase of greatness as a writer, especially as a fantasiste, but this piece is an example of his early mastery of the weird fiction form. In the mid-1930s he had corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft. Then Leiber showed himself to be a budding writer, articulating his appreciation of an established master, seeking advice on developing manuscripts, and learning from the veteran author what he needed to perfect his own natural brand of emerging talent. By the early 1940s, we encounter in Leiber a writer who has fully acquired stylistic finesse, dramatic power, and deftly-handled symbolic details; "Smoke Ghost" exemplifies these qualities, and takes the reader by astounding surprise in how it conjures up a true sense of terror. In the world of fantasy, Leiber is a writer who can take you into the deepest wells of laughter, suspense, thrills, and even compassion, and always these sensations hit you unexpectedly. These are the fruits of a complex weaver of plot and character. This was how the reviewer mostly knew Mr. Leiber's work, as most of his dark fantasy/weird fiction was not easy to obtain or as highly touted for a number of years. But once one discovers this other side to Leiber's imagination, it comes as a revelation. If he could make you laugh at the heroic gusto, knowing foolishness. and playful wits of his famous duo of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, his darker tales can scare you out of your wits, and he does in no way use gross psychotic violence to achieve this. No, Leiber is a master of psychological subtlety and depth, and when he employs this perspective on what causes unease and mind-fracturing mystification, he frighteningly exposes the scientific loose ends raggedly veiled by our insistently bland, Modernistic, prescriptive understanding of the cosmos. Here he can work a fear into the reader like no other, and Leiber never wastes a word in the particular magic, dark or otherwise, that he unerringly creates. His prose always comes across as a musical composition in terms of the well-wrought explication of the story, and his infallible dialogue could always be directly lifted into a movie script. "Smoke Ghost" visits upon us the awesome and insoluble inward nature of a ghostly phenomenon within a prosaic urban setting, replete with drab office building, an ever-reliable elevated commuter train, a successful businessman with an unresolved childhood, and a well-meaning literal-minded secretary who is fodder for the insidious forces underlying our brashly confident artificial world. The antagonist in this story emerges slowly, marginally, minimally, crudely materially at first, and then stalks our protagonist with growing pervasiveness, intrusiveness, and ironically, increasing indefinability. The ghost here is more a life-form stemming from another wave-length to our fleshly zone, yet it cohabits our world, manifesting gradually through the niggling detritus of our urban existence, seeking entry, attachment and energy through the doubts that increasingly crowd our minds as life progresses, no matter how hard we try to contain them, rationalize them, and shunt them away. Leiber's ghost is and remains of uncertain nature, something god-like, something demonic, something perhaps spawned from racial memory itself. It is a genius loci of a monstrous sort, though predatorially sly, alienatingly insistent and ultimately unforestallable, despite the employment of every resource of human cunning and survivalism. And yet, in the end, it can be appeased, and the manner of that seems to come from the deepest instincts of the human psyche -- ones we feel we have outgrown or else forgotten, but in the moment of ultimate terror, can summon up as a survival reflex encoded in our nervous system from days of flint-tipped spear and lightning-gifted fire. The story may most readily be acquired today from the collection, Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber, published by Night Shade Books, copyright 2010.