Certain themes are explored fully by an author then never touched again. John Wyndham never wrote The Return of the Triffids nor Robert A. Heinlein Starship Troopers 2. Such, I thought, was the case with Fritz Leiber and Conjure Wife, the 1943 novel about a man who finds out his wife, and all females, are witches. The novel appeared in John W. Campbell’s Unknown Worlds, and did not paint witches as all evil. Some are and some aren’t.
Fritz Leiber did return to witches in Spring 1951 for the only issue of Donald A. Wollheim’s 10 Fantasy Stories published by Avon. (There were several Pulps with numbered titles like Fifteen Western Stories and 5 Detective Novels. Wollheim took the classy John Wyndham novel Time to Rest and renamed it Tyrant & Slave-Girl on Planet Venus.) The third story was “Cry Witch” by Leiber.
This time Leiber shows no mercy for witches or their victims. He tells the story of a narrator who meets a very old man named Nemeck at a party. There they see a popular writer (‘an idealist”) with a beautiful girl on his arm. The old man and the girl’s eyes meet and something passes between them. Nemecek explains by telling of a friend who fell in love with such a girl back in Bohemia. The man was madly in love but finds out she is sleeping with every man she can. He kidnaps her and lives with her in the
mountains. She slips out at night by laying a severed hand in his. It doesn’t end well for the man, who knows she is a witch, a tormenting, ageless monster that he can not walk away from. Nemecek ends it by admitting he was the man. While not a novel-length exploration of witchcraft, Leiber does write a classy version of a Weird Tales story. (We can assume Wollheim paid better than the ailing WT in its final years under Dorothy McIlwraith.)
Leiber has matured as a writer and doesn’t fill the story with horror effects like the clunky “Spider Mansion” (Weird Tales, September 1942) from nine years ago. Instead he examines the almost witch-like influence some women have on men. The story could have been written as a noir tale though this is not Leiber playing field. He is a master of Fantasy so he writes the story in that way.
