PseudoPod 500: A Bit Of The Dark World


A Bit Of The Dark World

by Fritz Leiber


… and then one of the last rays of the sun must have struck a mirror-surface in the summit-crag, perhaps an outcropping of quartz, for it struck back at me like a golden rapier, making me blink, and then for an instant the beam was glitteringly black and I thought I saw (though nothing as clearly as I’d seen the black all-knowing spider-centipede on the pinnacle) a black shape — black with the queer churning blackness you see only at night with your eyes dosed. The shape coiled rapidly down the crag, into the cavern gullies and around the rocks and finally and utterly into the undergrowth above the fold and disappeared.

About the Author

Fritz Leiber

FRITZ REUTER LEIBER JR. (1910-1992) was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theater and films, playwright and chess expert. With writers such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, Leiber can be regarded as one of the fathers of sword and sorcery fantasy, having in fact created the term. Leiber was heavily influenced by H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Graves in the first two decades of his career. Beginning in the late 1950s, he was increasingly influenced by the works of Carl Jung, particularly by the concepts of the anima and the shadow. From the mid-1960s onwards, he began incorporating elements of Joseph Campbell’s THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES into his work.

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About the Narrator

Norm Sherman

Norm Sherman is the multi-talented master of all things weird and wonderful. In addition to founding, hosting, and producing the Drabblecast, hosting and co-editing Escape Pod, and creating his own original music, he also runs a non-profit organization. Norm lives on a small ship circling Phobos with his Nigerian princess Tinunbu. He occasionally lands long enough to read stories for us.

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