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. . . I want Betty's legs . . . I want your mother's death . . . I want your wanting me. I want your life. Feed me, baby, feed me." |
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Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951), p. 101 |
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Conjure Wife, by Fritz Leiber, is easily the most frightening and (necessarily) the most thoroughly convincing of all horror stories. Its premise is that witchcraft still flourishes, or at any rate survives, an open secret among women, a closed book to men. Under the rational overlay of 20th-century civilization this sickly growth, uncultivated, unsuspected, still manages to propagate itself: |
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". . . I don't do much. Like when my boyfriend was in the army, I did things to keep him from getting shot or hurt, and I've spelled him so that he'll keep away from other women. And I kin annernt with erl for sickness. Honest, I don't do much, ma'am. And it don't always work. And lots of things I can't get that way. |
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". . . Some I learned from Ma when I was a kid. And some from Mrs. Neidelshe gots spells against bullets from her grandmother who had a family in some European war way back. But most women won't tell you anything. And some spells I kind of figger out myself, and try different ways until they work." |
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Tansy Saylor, the wife of a promising young sociology professor at an ultra-conservative small American college, is, like most women, a witch. She is also an intelligent, modern young woman, and when her husband happens to discover the evidence of her witchcraft (not his own easy advancement, which he ascribes to luck, but certain small packets of dried leaves, earth, metal, filings, &c.) he's able to convince her that her faith in magic is compounded of superstition and neurosis. She burns her charms; Norman Saylor's "luck" immediately turns sour. But this is not allthe Balance has been upset. |
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The witches' warfare. . . was much like trench warfare or a battle between fortified linesa state of siege. Just as reinforced concrete or armor plating nullified the shells, so countercharms and protection procedures rendered relatively futile the most violent onslaughts. But once the armor and concrete were gone, |
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