San Francisco does the haunting in Fritz Leiber's 1977 novel. Franz Westen, a horror writer with binoculars and a window facing the hills, spends his afternoons studying the city he loves. One of those afternoons he picks out a figure on Corona Heights, two miles off, waving back at him.

Leiber builds the book on megapolisomancy, an occult science he invents and then works out in careful detail, and on the idea that a curse can run through a city for a century and brush the writers living in it. Clark Ashton Smith and Jack London belong to that lineage, which puts real literary San Francisco inside the fiction and keeps the whole thing hard to dismiss.

The scares stay quiet and cerebral. Jungian psychology shapes the way Franz reads his own dread, and the autobiographical streak gives the apartment, the paperbacks and the city walks a lived-in weight that most invented horror lacks. An earlier, shorter version appeared as The Pale Brown Thing. Readers who want gore should look elsewhere. Readers who like weird fiction that treats a street map as an occult document, and a lonely man at a window as a genuine emergency, have their book.