Both H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King have argued persuasively that there is a radical difference between fiction which frightens the reader and fiction which repulses the reader, although it should be noted that they came to somewhat different conclusions over the relative value of the two methods. Although Conjure Wife is a fine novel, and at times very scary, it includes: little in the way of gruesome detail of the sort we associate with the work of contemporary horror writers such as Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Anne Rice. Any book group whose members are familiar with recent horror fiction, might want to center their discussion on the difference between what Leiber is doing and the current practice of most best-selling horror novelists. They might also want to look into the work of other genre writers who avoid the gruesome, among them Robert Aickman and...