Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber

Conjure Wife (1943) by Fritz Leiber is a horror novel that may indeed be the first appearance of Samantha Stevens of Bewitched. Norman and Tansy Saylor are a middle-class couple. Norman is an up and coming psychology professor at a small liberal arts college in a small town. Tansy is, as Norman suddenly finds out one day when he combs through Sansy’s dressing room and finds spells and bags of cemetery earth, a witch who conjures up spells. Norman, like Darren in Bewitched, is furious with Tansy and orders her to burn or destroy all the spell-making machinery in her dressing room and act like a normal wife. This directive nearly proves his undoing because his status and position were dependent on Tansy’s good magic protecting him and, once her spells are vanquished, Tansy herself is vanquished and turned into a walking corpse who does the bidding of evil witches, who turn out to be the jealous wives of other professors. Most of all though, they steal Tansy’s soul and she wants it back.

Although the novel starts a bit slowly, the reader is soon caught up in a maelstrom of events as Norman races against time to find Tansy’s body wandering across the greater New York area and there are odd scenes as he tries to get her attention and, spellbound, she ignores him and the crowd at the bus station turns on him as someone harassing a woman. Leiber does an excellent job of capturing the horror that Norman experiences to find that Tansy is under someone’s control and whether or not he can save her by the bare hints she leaves him. He then has to do battle with the other witches to save Tansy’s soul, something bumbling Darren Stevens of Bewitched, never attempted.

There is almost a Twilight Zone type curtain-pull-back of reality here where Norman finds that not is all as it seems and that there are hidden forces at work that he never would have contemplated.