The Black Ewe: The Woman, the Madness—And the Trail of Corpses She Left Behind

Fritz Leiber’s The Black Ewe begins with a broken engagement and a question: why would a man suddenly walk away from the woman he planned to marry? Ken’s answer reaches back through Lavinia Simes’s past, where former suitors have met fatal “accidents,” strange predictions have slipped into ordinary conversation, and a childhood experiment produced symbols no one could explain. The longer Ken looks at the pattern, the harder coincidence becomes to believe.

Then a party changes everything. Lavinia drinks too much, begins whispering privately to the guests, and an evening of friendly conversation erupts into something disturbingly unlike the present. Ken leaves with more questions than answers, but the following morning an ordinary sightseeing trip through Chicago gives him one final reason to reconsider the woman beside him.

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) was an American writer whose career crossed science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His fiction appeared in magazines including Unknown, Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Among his best-known works are Conjure Wife, The Big Time, Our Lady of Darkness, and the long-running Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories.

Leiber received six Hugo Awards and several Nebula Awards during a career spanning more than five decades. Equally comfortable with strange cities, distant futures, supernatural threats, and dark comedy, he became one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century speculative fiction.