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. They would wander along The Bleak Shore to a howling tower to show how fear isn't the product of murder but the cause.įritz Reuter Leiber Jr. A most violent of clashes ensues.įafhrd and the Gray Mouser descend into Thieves House to discover the exacting skill of the united backstabbing Thieves of Lankhmar and their rival guild, The Slayer's Brotherhood, the city's unionized killers. Their hearts altered by the loss of first true love, they embark on a long and winding path of drunken debauchery and womanizing until crossing paths with two cross wizards, Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes. Swords Against Death, the second story in the Lankhmar series, finds Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser beginning their real journey. It is a world of human complexities and violent action, of discovery and mystery, of swords and sorcery.

Fafhrd and Mouse are not innocents their world is no land of honor and righteousness. Lankhmar, is Leiber's fully realized vivid incarnation of urban decay and civilization's corroding effect on the human psyche. They wondered and wandered to the edges of the Outer Sea, across the Land of Nehwon and throughout every nook and cranny of gothic Lankhmar, Nehwon's grandest and most mystically corrupt city. While Lord of the Rings took the world by storm, Fritz Leiber's fantastic but thoroughly flawed anti-heroes, Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, adventured and stumbled deep within the caves of Inner Earth as well.

Fritz Leiber, very likely the best of all of us, the man who has won more awards than anyone else in the genre, the man who's words have lifted this too often wretched category to Olympian heights more than anyone cares to mention.' Harlan Ellison 'Wonderful, magical Fritz Leiber, before whom Bradbury and Sturgeon and Norton and Goldman and Barth and Vonnegut bow, not to mention Robinson, Busby, Anderson and even yours truly, the maddest egomaniac of them all.

Swords Against Death by Fritz Leiber