Our Lady of Darkness is, in essence, Leiber’s take on “Genius Loci”, in that spirits inhabit and are tied to certain locations, buildings and places— almost as if the locations themselves have their own mind. Instead of a fictional location, Leiber turns the Corona Heights area of San Francisco into a haunting ground (featuring a fictional field of study called Megapolisomancy, itself somewhat reminiscent of Psychogeography), inhabited by the vague spirits of prominent writers and thinkers that once lived there— Clark Ashton Smith most prominently. In doing this, Leiber has written a novel that has a meta-textual pop-culture edge to it, but also one that explores a primordial sense of where our fears and horror comes from. I think it’s fantastic, and Leiber’s writing is always a breeze to read, with a conversational, yet sardonic tone that’s entertaining and punchy, but very thought-provoking.