Conjure Wife

Conjure Wife

1953 Twayne hardcover edition
Author	Fritz Leiber
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Fantasy
Publisher	Street & Smith Publications for Unknown Worlds
Publication date	April 1943 (in Unknown Worlds), 1952 (as a novel)

Conjure Wife (1943) is a supernatural horror novel by American writer Fritz Leiber. Its premise is that witchcraft flourishes as an open secret among women. The story is told from the point of view of a small-town college professor who discovers that his wife is a witch.

This novel was the first by Fritz Leiber and was first published in the April 1943 edition of Unknown. It is said to have been the inspiration for at least three films:Weird Woman (1944), Night of the Eagle (also known as Burn, Witch, Burn!) (1962), and Witches' Brew (also known as Which Witch is Which?) (1980).

Tansy Saylor is the wife of an up-and-coming young sociology professor at a small, conservative American college. She is also a witch. Her husband, Norman, discovers this one day while rummaging through her dressing table: he finds vials of graveyard dirt, packets of hair and fingernail clippings from their acquaintances, and other evidence of her witchcraft. He confronts Tansy, and manages to convince her that her faith in magic is a result of superstition and neurosis. Tansy burns her charms; and Norman's luck immediately goes sour. He realizes that he had been protected, up til now, by Tansy's charms, and that as a result of his meddling, they are both now powerless to counteract the spells and charms of the other witches all around them.

The novel is widely acknowledged to be a classic of modern horror fiction. It was included in David Pringle's Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels and in Fantasy: The 100 Best Books by James Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock. In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, David Langford described it as "an effective exercise in the paranoid."

Damon Knight wrote

Conjure Wife, by Fritz Leiber, is easily the most frightening and (necessarily) the most thoroughly convincing of all modern horror stories...Leiber develops [the witchcraft] theme with the utmost dexterity, piling up alternate layers of the mundane and outré, until at the story's real climax, the shocker at the end of Chapter 14, I am not ashamed to say that I jumped an inch out of my seat...Leiber has never written anything better.