Conjure Wife

 
I stumbled upon Fritz Leiber's masterpiece of witchcraft vs. psychology my sophomore year of high school, deep in the bowels of a used bookstore in Williston, North Dakota, that charged by the pound.  The edition I found was published in 1968, and proclaimed that "dark shadows" of witchcraft held a woman in its thrall; obviously, this particular edition hoped to piggyback off the success of the supernatural soap bubbles of ABC's Dark Shadows. 

I finished rereading the novel the other night, and I always enjoy its take on female power and man's seemingly inherent fear that women would truly invest in this power and organize; the idea that all women are witches (to some degree) is a rather amusing conceit. 

A friend of mine and I, just the other night, were bemoaning the fact that the novel has yet to be truly, satisfyingly filmed, though three attempts have been made:  Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson came close with Night of the Eagle / Burn Witch Burn, closer than Universal's Weird Woman, which starred Lon Cheney (minus his furry Wolfman makeup) and Wolf Man co-star Evelyn Ankers, and far more successfully than Witches' Brew, an unofficial adaptation, and Lana Turner's swan song (also featuring Dark Shadows alum Kathryn Leigh Scott).  I discovered that Matheson and Beaumont's original screenplay, entitled Conjure Wife, and featuring significant differences from the translation eventually made to the screen, was published in 2009 in a tribute to Matheson entitled He Is Legend.  It arrived in the mail today and I plan to devour it this evening.

If you've never partaken of Conjure Wife in any of its manifestations, then I invite you to enjoy an excerpt from the original novel that caused me to drop it with nerveless fingers the first time I read it.  Here, skeptic professor of sociology Norman Saylor has been convinced that his wife Tansy, whom he recently discovered practicing witchcraft in order to protect him and his career, has taken upon herself a curse meant to kill Norman.  The curse has sent Tansy out into the dark waters of the bay; Norman, scrambling, has attempted a spell Tansy left behind: