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What did I like about Fritz Leiber's book Conjure Wife?
First, keep in mind that it was written back around 1950.
It presents a picture of college life that is long gone--straitlaced, stuffy, professor types and their equally, on the surface at least, well-masked wives.
The first chapter, which can be somewhat boring, presents one such professor, of social anthropology, who has spent the last 20 or so years traveling around the world on summer sabbaticals studying the magic and mythology of various primitive cultures, and has "dragged", as he thought, his dutiful wife along on each of these forrays. He has just finished some unmentioned project, and in his euphoria, he decides to be a little "naughty" and do a little snooping in his wife's things. He discovers a multitude of charms, and warding objects about the house (I believe they are referred to as "gris gris" if memory serves me correctly). He is appalled. because he has the atheistic belief that magic has no power, that worship of anything is a waste of time at best, and a hiding from reality at worst--how could his intellectual wife have let herself get ensnared by such harmful and spurious beliefs?? So he confronts her with it, and convinces her, using his intellectual prowess, that she should destroy all the items and submit to the world as it is. Little does he know.
It seems that he has experienced such phenominal success at such a relatively young age precisely because her charms and wards (that she had collected from the best magicks of over a dozen cultures) were working so well against the machinations of the other professors' wives (who hadn't had access to the multicultural practices). What was worse, he convinced her to throw away her spell book in the trash, instead of burning it. One of the other women, suddenly sensing that the lid of protection is off, acquires said spell book, and starts using it to her, and the coven she controls, advantage, against the professor and more specifically his wife.
The suspense slowly builds and builds to an almost unbearable level, sort of like Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, or the original performance of Ravel's Bolero (with the ever more erotic dancing of the female dancer that it was originally written for).
HAPPY READING!
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