Tellers of Weird Tales

Another old wise man once said that there is nothing new under the sun. So is dark fantasy really new? I'm not so sure. Here is Gary Hoppenstand's two-part definition of the genre (or sub-genre, or sub-sub-genre):

"Dark fantasy . . . is a a type of horror story in which humanity is threatened with destruction by hostile cosmic forces beyond the normal ken of mortals."

"Dark fantasy is nihilistic fiction . . . ."

I should point out that the words are his but their juxtaposition here is mine.

If you accept just the first part, then it seems to me that there have been tales of dark fantasy since the beginning of time, for we have always been "threatened with destruction from hostile cosmic forces beyond the normal ken of mortals." The most obvious example is of the gods, devils, demons, and supernatural monsters of mythology, organized religion, and folklore, more specifically, Satan his bad self. In fact, I would say that "destruction by hostile cosmic forces beyond the normal ken of mortals" is one possible definition of evil. But if God is dead and there is no such thing as evil--in other words, if nihilism is just one of many reasonable ways of looking at the world--then maybe dark fantasy is something new after all, for God's death is a recent phenomenon, probably dating from--you guessed it--the nineteenth century.

On the other hand, if dark fantasy arose as Christian belief declined, then could there not have been tales of dark fantasy from the pre-Christian era, either before Christ or before Europe was Christianized? My first thought is of the epic Beowulf, written down in the Christian era but told of pre-Christian days. My second is of ancient Greek myths couched in stoicism. Also, if dark fantasy arose as a result of the disaster of World War I, could there not have been tales of dark fantasy from other disastrous times in European history, when God seemed to have withdrawn from involvement in human affairs and the universe to have become incomprehensible? The time of the Black Plague would seem an obvious example of that.

* * *

Again the question: Is dark fantasy a new genre? If so, who created it? It seems to me that if you're creating something, you might know that you're creating it. By that measure, Francis Stevens may not have been the creator. But then we'll never know, as we don't have anything from her outside her own stories (or nothing that I'm aware of anyway). In that case, H.P. Lovecraft presents himself as the more likely creator. However, that assumes that all creation is a conscious process. You won't go very far with an assumption like that. I think the thing to do is to look at the stories of Francis Stevens and see what pops up. That's next in this series.

Gertrude M. Barrows (1884-1948) was nineteen and as yet unmarried when her first story, "The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar," was published in The Argosy in March 1904. Her byline, effectively concealing her sex, was "G.M. Barrows." The story is brief and takes up a little less than six and a half pages of the magazine. It has been reprinted half a dozen times in the last 111 years.

"The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar" is the story of a man who, when struck by an automobile, is carried by the driver into his home. The driver, named Lawrence, is small, "weazened," and ugly. Despite his hostility to medicine, Lawrence nurses Dunbar, the narrator, back to health. As it turns out, Lawrence is a scientist absorbed in the isolation of a new element called stellarite, one that holds enough life-force "to vivify a herd of elephants." By accident, that life-force passes into the narrator, making him, as a result, "almost limitless" in strength. (1)

"The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar," written when its author was seventeen and accepted by the first magazine to which she submitted it, is a kind of super-science story. You might also call it science fiction or scientific romance. (The term science fiction had not yet been invented when "The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar" was first printed.) More than anything, it reads like the origin story of a comic book superhero and could very easily be turned into a comic book script. "I [sic] had just one merit, as I remember it," wrote Gertrude Barrows, "and that was a rather grotesque originality." (2) Just how original was "The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar"? I can't say, but it may be an early example of stories in which a man is made into a superman by science. Published in 1904 by a teenaged author, it did not yet show any signs of dark fantasy, but could it have been the first science fiction story published by an American woman? If so, then the case for Francis Stevens as an innovator waxes stronger.

Notes

(1) You can find "The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar" in Google books.

(2) Quoted in "Francis Stevens: The Woman Who Invented Dark Fantasy" by Gary Hoppenstand in The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Francis Stevens (2004), p. xii.

The Argosy, March 1904.

Published in the April 14, 1917, issue of All-Story Weekly, "The Nightmare" was Gertrude Barrows Bennett's first story since "The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar" thirteen years earlier. It was her first under the pseudonym Francis Stevens. "The Nightmare" is a long short story--perhaps more properly a novelette--made up of fourteen chapters. Nonetheless, it was not serialized in its original publication but came complete in a single issue. In The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (2004), it takes up seventy-seven pages and can be read in two or three sittings.

"The Nightmare" opens in a stateroom on board the RMS Lusitania, but by the bottom of page two, the protagonist, Mr. Roland C. Jones of New York, New York, is swimming for his life. He lands inexplicably on a volcanic South Seas island, and from there is off on an adventure involving two rival Russian brothers--Prince Sergius the nihilist and Prince Paul the czarist--and their quest for a kind of philosopher's stone. (The brothers are also rivals for the affections of a pretty American nurse, Miss Weston.) The island on which the action takes place is called--with no small bit of irony--Joker Island. There are labyrinthine caves, humongous and very deadly cabbages, malodorous mushrooms, giant bats, enormous spiders, and other horrors on the island. Mr. Jones is traded back and forth between the rivals before being rescued by his friends. In the end, all is explained satisfactorily and in spite of the title, it all really happened and was not a dream or a nightmare at all.

The timing of the story and within the story has some significance. Mr. Jones goes in the water when the Lusitania is sunk. So the starting date is May 7, 1915. Two years later, he is pulled out again, and the story closes in late March, presumably March 1917, or shortly before "The Nightmare" was published in All-Story Weekly. (1) At almost exactly the same time--on April 6, 1917--the United States declared war on Germany. Meanwhile, the Russians were getting out. On March 15, 1917, the Czar abdicated, and though the fighting continued, the wind had gone out of the Russian sails, and within a year they had effectively surrendered.

Set against the backdrop of a world at war (and featuring a new technology, the airplane), "The Nightmare" must have benefitted by being so immediate and topical. But there were other recent developments worth considering. Gertrude Barrows Bennett had not published a story since 1904. She had been busy of course rearing her daughter, but is that the entire explanation for her silence? Only five years before "The Nightmare" was published, Edgar Rice Burroughs had arrived on the scene with his stories "Under the Moons of Mars" in The All-Story (beginning in February 1912), and "Tarzan of the Apes" in The All-Story (in October 1912). "The Nightmare" is a fairly conventional story in the mode of Edgar Rice Burroughs (or Jules Verne), with its light tone, its innocent protagonist thrown into a strange adventure, and its Lost World/South Seas/jungle setting. (There is even a bit of the club story towards the end.) It seems pretty likely to me that Francis Stevens was inspired by Burroughs and wanted to write a story like his. In that she succeeded.

I have just two more points to make. First, Francis Stevens' protagonist, Mr. Roland C. Jones (2), is a castaway on Joker Island. In 1910, Gertrude Barrows Bennett's husband, Stewart Bennett, "drowned in a tropical storm while on an expedition seeking sunken treasure." (3) You might as well consider that real-life event as a source for her story. The psychological implications are perhaps more significant. Second, if dark fantasy is defined as "a type of horror story in which humanity is threatened with destruction by hostile cosmic forces beyond the normal ken of mortals," then I don't detect even one whit of dark fantasy in "The Nightmare." (4) In fact, it's a lighthearted story in which the girl is won and all is right with the world in the end. (5)

But then America had not yet witnessed the horrors of war.

Notes

(1) There is some similarity here between "The Call of Cthulhu" (written 1926, published 1928) and "The Nightmare." First, both take place, at least in part, on an island in the South Pacific. Both describe horrors on that island. Both are tied to real events, and both involve a timetable that can be worked out by a careful reading of the story. Finally, both were published shortly after the events in the story had come to a close.

(2) I wonder if it's going too far to suggest that the name "Roland C. Jones" is a pun on the saying "rolling the bones," that is, to shoot craps.

(3) From Lloyd Arthur Eshbach's introduction to The Heads of Cerberus, quoted in "Francis Stevens: The Woman Who Invented Dark Fantasy" by Gary Hoppenstand in The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Francis Stevens (2004), p. xii.

(4) Prince Sergius is a nihilist, but not in the contemporary sense. Rather, he is a nihilist in the nineteenth-century Russian political sense. Gary Hoppenstand notes the treatment by Francis Stevens of "radical political thought" as an expression of "the American readers' social paranoia." (The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy, p. xix.) If you thought defining "dark fantasy" is hard, try defining "social paranoia." In any event, given the last hundred years of murder, starvation, war, torture, imprisonment, and oppression at the hands of people subscribing to "radical political thought," I would say that in this case "foresight" or "wisdom" is a better word than "paranoia."
(5) There is even a suggestion of more adventures to come in the life of Mr. Roland C. Jones.

All-Story Weekly, April 14, 1917, with "The Nightmare" by Francis Stevens as the cover story. Note the use of the word "weird." A new magazine with that word in its title was only six years away.

Fifteen months passed between the publication of "The Nightmare" (Apr. 14, 1917) and Francis Stevens' second published story, "The Labyrinth," a three-part serial that ran from July 27 to August 10, 1918, in All-Story Magazine. (1) Reprinted in The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (2004), "The Labyrinth" is a short novel or novella and runs to 114 pages in all. The story is about one and a half times the length of "The Nightmare."

Like "The Nightmare,""The Labyrinth" is a fairly conventional story except for the startling introduction of a fantastic and terrifying setting. In "The Nightmare," that setting is the interior of Joker Island. In "The Labyrinth," it is the labyrinth itself, an impressive work of imagination on the part of the author. The story takes place in Marshall City, the fictional capital of an unnamed Midwestern state, and opens with the disappearance of Veronica Wyndham, a secretary to prominent men in business and government. (2) She is also the cousin of the narrator, Mr. Hildreth Wyndham, and the fiancée of his friend, Rex Tolliver. Together and separately, Hildreth and Rex set off on an investigation into her disappearance. That investigation leads to the country estate of Governor Clinton Charles, Veronica's former employer. There they uncover the reason for her disappearance, and with her and the governor in tow, they become lost, first in a labyrinth of hedges, then, by accident, in a far more sinister underground labyrinth of concrete and steel. The rest of the story involves their efforts to find their way out.

As I said, "The Labyrinth" is a fairly conventional story, a combination mystery/thriller, complete with a damsel in distress. There is a reference to a story by Edgar Allan Poe (3) and a mention of Sherlock Holmes. The author was obviously aware of the vein in which she was working. There is also a suggestion of the Yellow Peril or Chinatown kind of story, but that goes nowhere: the Chinese characters are peripheral and harmless. (4) Lastly, there is a recapitulation of sorts of the conte cruel, an anticipation of the weird menace story of later decades, and perhaps even an influence on the movie Labyrinth from 1986.

"The Labyrinth" is not only longer than "The Nightmare," it's also a deeper, more complex, and more sophisticated story. It's no wonder that the author would have spent a year or more working it out. As in "The Nightmare," there's a little too much busyness, with people running here and there and being separated before being united again. "The Labyrinth" is also a more melodramatic story, and there's a good deal of stilted writing and dialogue, but then that seems to be a characteristic of Francis Stevens' writing. All of these flaws are redeemed by the author's depiction of the underground labyrinth, a place of true terror and menace.

Despite the disappearance and possible kidnapping or murder of Veronica Wyndham, the story begins in a lighthearted way. Hildreth and Rex are like two-thirds of the Rover Boys. Once in the labyrinth, they come face to face with evil, and there the tone of the story changes. With its ever-shifting walls and passageways, moreover with its menacing mottoes--all taken from the Bible--the labyrinth takes on a malignant personality of its own. The temptation is to see this inexplicable and inescapable maze as a symbol of life or of human existence. That symbolism might lead down the path towards dark fantasy. However, there isn't any evidence in the story that the labyrinth represents something about our place in the universe. Instead, it appears to be the manifestation of one man's evil and depraved mind.

"I have been told," says Hildreth, "that there is no experience more terrible than for a sane man to find himself in the hands of a lunatic." (p. 140) It may be more terrible still to find oneself in the mind of a lunatic, for the malignant personality manifested in the maze proves to be that of the previous owner of the estate who, bent on revenge, designed it as a trap for a man who never shows his face in the course of the story. In his place, Hildreth, Veronica, Rex, and Governor Charles (5) fall into the labyrinth, and their escape is mostly by luck. It's worth noting that one of the characters refers to the "convolutions" of the labyrinth, a word that evokes images of the human brain. It's also worth noting that the spring that opens the trap is a quotation--or misquotation--carved in stone: "The heaven for height, and the earth for depth, and the heart of man is unsearchable." (p. 179) (6)

None of the characters in "The Nightmare" is evil, nor do they encounter evil. The threats in the story are cryptozoological in nature. "The Labyrinth" is another story, for its characters do encounter evil, though it's the evil of a dead man, an evil that has survived him in the labyrinth he so cleverly and diabolically designed. I think that the key word in the phrase dark fantasy is dark--dark in mood, dark in its view of humanity and of human existence. There is a certain darkness in "The Labyrinth," but only within the walls of the maze. In the end, the four main characters escape, the girl's heart is won, and at least two of the four live happily ever after. In "The Labyrinth," Francis Stevens may have been leaning towards some kind of dark fantasy, writing as she did about the unsearchable heart of man, but she wasn't there quite yet.

* * *

Once the four main characters descend into the labyrinth, they come upon mottoes adorning the walls. These are meant to torment or terrify the man who was supposed to be caught in the trap. The first motto quoted in the story is sort of a shock:

That Which Is Crooked Cannot Be Made Straight,
and That Which Is Wanting Cannot Be Numbered

The quote is from Ecclesiastes 1:15, but it's in a form similar to another cryptic couplet familiar to fans of weird fiction:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

So was Francis Stevens' story an influence upon H.P. Lovecraft? As the old commercial says, the world may never know.

Notes

(1) "The Labyrinth" was actually Gertrude Barrows Bennett's third published story but only the second under her pseudonym Francis Stevens.
(2) Gertrude Barrows Bennett was herself a secretary. We might as well consider the heroine she created to be an idealized version of herself.
(3) The story is "Berenice" (1835). The bloody teeth in the story remind me of the bloody teeth in The Blair Witch Project--or vice versa--but let's not dig up that old topic.
(4) Those of a politically correct bent who slaver over depictions of the "races" in old stories should not miss Francis Stevens' treatment of her Chinese characters in "The Labyrinth."
(5) Here's a quote from the story: "Governor Charles . . . considers himself above the law." (p. 126) Substitute the governor's given name--Clinton--and you have a prophecy worthy of Nostradamus.
(6) Proverbs 25:3.
A final note: Francis Stevens recognized the fanatic in "The Labyrinth." Here are her words: "His generally kindly face was set in the lines of a fanatic, who will sacrifice himself and every man on earth to the Moloch of his conscience." (p. 190) I find that to be an extraordinary insight for a mere pulp story. It was echoed in this quote from C.S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Leftists like to claim that quote as their own. I think it's because of the part about "moral busybodies." The truth is that Lewis' words are an indictment of leftism or statism, not an endorsement. Stevens' fanatic and Lewis' moral busybodies--what Eric Hoffer called true believers--are still with us, and, still, they will not rest.

All-Story Weekly, July 27, 1918, the first installment of "The Labyrinth" by Francis Stevens.

Nineteen eighteen was a good year for Gertrude Barrows Bennett. Writing as Francis Stevens, she earned $1,330 for four stories published in All-Story Weekly and The Argosy. "The Labyrinth," from July and August, is novella-length. "The Citadel of Fear," from September and October, is longer still. "Friend Island" and "Behind the Curtain," both published in September, are very short by comparison. (1) In The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (2004), "Friend Island" runs to eleven pages, "Behind the Curtain" to just eight. You might call "Friend Island" a tale rather than a short story, but if you read it as a simple tale, you will miss more than a little of its meaning and context.

The subtitle of "Friend Island"--"Being the Veracious Tale of an Ancient Mariness, Heard and Reported in the Year A.D. 2100"--tells the reader exactly what she is about to encounter, namely, Gertrude Barrows Bennett's first out-and-out fantasy. The story hints at a futuristic society in which women rule and men are subservient. At first glance, that seems to an unnecessary detail or distraction in a story so short. Its purpose becomes clearer as the Ancient Mariness recounts an experience from her youth.

Time was when men had more power. That was before, when the old sea-woman was young and first shipwrecked on a Pacific Island. In her lifetime, in the many decades since, women have gained in power, while men have slipped into subservience. How that came to be is not explained in "Friend Island," but the transition is apparently complete and irreversible. The implication is that women have rebelled against patriarchy--but they may have had some help. The Ancient Mariness learned something about men while on an island she named--significantly--"Anita.""A man is just full of mannishness," she says, "and the best of 'em ain't good enough for a lady to sacrifice her sensibilities to put up with." (p. 203) She learned that lesson in her acquaintance with Nelson Smith, a fellow castaway, who, besides Anita, is the only named character in the story.

"Friend Island" is an apt title, and Anita--meaning full of grace or mercy or kindness--is an apt name, for the island is indeed a friend to the girl castaway:

When I was gay [she remembered], it [the island] was bright and cheerful. It was glad when I come [to the island], and it treated me right until I got that grouchy it had to mope from sympathy. It loved me like a friend. (p. 199)

That's not merely a fantasy or a delusion or an expression of loneliness. The island--Anita--is indeed alive. She is also a true friend to the girl castaway, and by extension to women everywhere, being as she is, "a lady," but one who "knowed how to behave when she was insulted." (p. 102) Nelson Smith does the insulting, and for that, Anita literally blows up. And maybe that's how women came to rule the earth. Maybe the earth herself rebelled against the rule of men.

* * *

"Friend Island" was not only Gertrude Barrows Bennett's first full-fledged fantasy, it was also her first story with a female protagonist and her first from a decidedly feminist viewpoint. If there is any doubt of that, consider this quote from near the end of the story, written by the unnamed male narrator:

"In what field is not woman our subtle superior?" (p. 203)

"Friend Island" was preceded by "Herland," a utopian romance/Lost Worlds story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and published in the magazine The Forerunner in December 1915. Whether Gertrude Barrows Bennett read The Forerunner is probably irrelevant, for this was the era of women's rights. She would have been only one of many thousands of American feminists. The war had helped bring that on as women got out of the house and into the workplace to do jobs ordinarily done by men. As an example of how times were changing, on December 16, 1918, Somebody's Stenog by A.E. Hayward made its debut as a regular daily comic strip. The title character was--like Gertrude Barrows Bennett--a stenographer and one of the first independent women in the comics. She started a trend--they were called "girl strips"--that lasted into the 1930s and '40s. As another example, the Nineteenth Amendment, extending the franchise to women, was ratified on August 18, 1920, just two years after "Friend Island" was published. Francis Stevens was not the first feminist science fiction author, but she was at least a pioneer.

* * *

So is "Friend Island" in the category of dark fantasy? In Goldfinger by Ian Fleming (1959), the title character has this to say:

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times, it's enemy action."

If I can modify that, I would say that three times makes a continuing theme. "Friend Island," with "The Nightmare" and "The Labyrinth," establishes a theme in the stories of Francis Stevens. The theme is of a physical place that takes on a personality. Joker Island, from "The Nightmare," is well named, for it seems to mock and toy with its human inhabitants. In the end, however, the island is conquered. The labyrinth, from the story of the same name, also seems to have a personality, which turns out to be that of its deceased designer. There is some doubt that the four main characters will escape, but they do in the end, and once again, the place is defeated. "Friend Island" is another matter, for the eponymous island is alive and aware. It's also not an antagonistic force (except to the vulgar man). In the end, Anita is not defeated, even if she does blow her stack.

A physical place with a personality, a place with its own hidden, sometimes perverse, often inscrutable, or even more often malevolent ways--is that dark fantasy? Here is the two-part definition again:

"Dark fantasy . . . is a a type of horror story in which humanity is threatened with destruction by hostile cosmic forces beyond the normal ken of mortals."

"Dark fantasy is nihilistic fiction . . . ."

I would not consider "Friend Island" to meet either requirement, for it is not a horror story, nor a story in which humanity is threatened with destruction, nor is it nihilistic or very dark. As for the force in the story, I would not consider the island to be hostile, nor cosmic, and perhaps not even beyond the normal ken of mortals. It seems more likely to me that in creating her friend island, Stevens drew on the imagery of Mother Earth and Mother Nature, a sometimes wrathful force perhaps, but over all, warm, caring, nurturing, and benevolent.

* * *

Finally, another quote:

The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame in any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness (2) of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.

The quote is from Joseph Glanville [sic]. (3) It forms the epigraph of "A Descent into the Maelström" by Edgar Allan Poe (1841). Like "Friend Island," Poe's tale is framed by an unnamed narrator who hears and records the words of a person who has come face to face with a powerful force of nature. Unlike Stevens' island Anita, the maelström is non-living. Its destructiveness is simply an expression of the vast, profound, and unsearchable ways of God in Nature.

My reason for quoting Poe's epigraph is larger than any similarities between the two stories, however strong they might be. If you substitute "cosmic forces" for the word "God" in Glanvill's quote, you might find yourself coming close to a definition of dark fantasy. The difference of course is that God created, loves, and provides for humanity, whereas dark fantasy is, in Gary Hoppenstand's words, "nihilistic fiction in its prediction (directly or indirectly) of a terrible end to our world that we inhabit in blissful ignorance." So is this the choice, between Joseph Glanvill's God in Nature and in Providence on one side, and dark fantasy's essentially hostile, indifferent, and ultimately destructive universe on the other? Maybe so, but then maybe that has always been the choice.

Notes
(1) "Friend Island" was published in the September 7, 1918, issue of All-Story Weekly.
(2) Recall the quote in "The Labyrinth": "The heaven for height, and the earth for depth, and the heart of man is unsearchable" (Proverbs 25:3).
(3) Readers of H.P. Lovecraft's stories might recognize Glanvill's name.

The living island is not a new idea. It goes back at least as far as the mythical aspidochelone of the Middle Ages. This image is from the Danish Royal Library, and though I can't be sure it's of an aspidochelone, I think I can see at least the word "aspido" in the middle of the second line below the fish.

The aspidochelone is a hostile creature. The Living Island from H.R. Pufnstuf is, like Francis Stevens' Anita, a friendly island.

Scott O'Dell's 1960 Island of the Blue Dolphins is also about a girl stranded alone on an island. Based on a true story, O'Dell's novel is one of loneliness, courage, and perseverance. I read it long ago but don't remember any particular personification of the island.

Krakoa, the Island That Walks Like a Man from Marvel Comics, is on the other end of the scale.

In high school you learn that there are four basic conflicts in literature: man against man, man against nature, man against society, and man against himself. Stories of the sea are often stories of man against nature. But does fantasy introduce a fifth conflict, of man against monster? In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus must pass between Scylla and Charybdis, two forces of nature but also seemingly two forces animated by hostility towards man. Is that dark fantasy? What about Cthulhu in his island city? There can be no doubt that if dark fantasy is real, then "The Call of Cthulhu" is it. In fact, maybe all dark fantasy is simply an iteration of the Cthulhu Mythos. In any case, was there any artist better suited to illustrate the nightmarish scene of Odysseus and the Scylla than the great eighteenth century fantasist Henry Fuseli?

"Friend Island," being a "Veracious Tale of an Ancient Mariness," is cast in the mold of Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798). Like The Odyssey, both are tales of a maritime journey. Coleridge's "Rime" also has a force of nature that acts against a man, but only because that man acted against nature by shooting the albatross. The illustration is by Gustave Doré.

Another illustration by Doré from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The mariner has lashed himself to the ship in a storm . . .

Just as Poe's mariner in "A Descent into the Maelström" lashes himself to a cask. In so doing, he escapes the whirlpool. His encounter with a vast, profound, and unsearchable Nature leaves him a changed man however. The illustration is by Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990).

So is "Friend Island," or for that matter any of these stories dark fantasy? I can't say, but I think that Francis Stevens' story at least is not one of threats and destruction, but instead one about Mother Nature--with a feminist twist--and probably one of the first feminist science fiction stories written by an American woman.

"The Citadel of Fear" by Francis Stevens was first published as a seven-part serial in The Argosy from September 14 to October 26, 1918. It was reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries Combined with Fantastic Novels Magazine in February 1942, and again as a mass-market paperback in 1970. The paperback edition has a brief introduction by Sam Moskowitz and runs to 270 pages in all. "The Citadel of Fear" was Francis Stevens' longest story to date and is actually a novel in its length and complexity. There are twenty-three chapters in all, some quite short. From here on out, treating it as a novel, I'll italicize the title.

The Citadel of Fear begins like a Western with two treasure hunters lost in the desert. Colin "Boots" O'Hara is young, fair, tall, strong, and very Irish in temperament. His companion is Archer Kennedy, short, dark, a little older than O'Hara, and altogether an unsavory character. O'Hara, the hero, is, as he calls himself, "a good Catholic." Kennedy on the other hand is a materialist, a fallen man, ripe for further falling.

As it turns out, O'Hara and Kennedy are lost in Mexico (or "Old Mexico" as my octogenarian landlady of many years ago called it) beyond a place called Cuachictin.

Barren, unpopulated, forsaken even of the Indians, this region had an evil reputation. "Collados del Demonio," Hills of the Fiend, the Mexicans called it. (p. 15)

The two men--perhaps two sides of the same Irish coin--finally stumble onto a kind of oasis, a lost valley inhabited by a mysterious and faintly threatening planter, Svend Biornson, and his family. Biornson proceeds to lock the men in their room. In their escape, they move further up the valley and are captured by a forgotten race of men. The men inhabit a hidden city called Tlapallan, the city of Quetzacoatl. With that, The Citadel of Fear passes from one genre into another, from a Western--a strange kind of Western to be sure--into a Lost Worlds romance.

* * *

The claim is that Francis Stevens created the sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of dark fantasy. People don't seem to agree very well on the definition of that term, but dark fantasy is apparently the Cthulhu Mythos, only more so. If I understand it correctly, in dark fantasy, the earth and humanity are threatened by beings that were old when the world was young. They may be hostile towards us, or they may simply be indifferent. They are certainly beyond our understanding. That seems to be only half the definition, however, and maybe not even the more important half. The Citadel of Fear is the first evidence I have read that Francis Stevens did indeed work in this ill-defined sub-genre or sub-sub-genre, for there is indeed an ancient and hostile god in the story. What's missing from her story is the other half of the definition, the operative half, for dark fantasy is dark.

* * *

Many years ago, I went with a group of people to the library of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. Most were botanists, but there were some herpetologists and other wildlife researchers as well. The library holds a first printing of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. That book was on display that day. We looked at the book in its glass case, but I also watched the botanists and herpetologists as they looked. It was an enlightening thing for me to see, for these people looked upon Darwin's tome as a Christian would look upon an early Bible. They were in awe, and a kind of reverence came upon them. It occurred to me that they--as science-minded people--hoped that they might someday change the world with their research, observations, and insights as Darwin once did. If they could only do what he did--if they could somehow lay bare hidden truths about the world--if they could uncover earth's secret history the way Darwin, or in other fields, the way Mendel, Freud, Einstein, and Watson and Crick did--they might be esteemed beyond all measure, they might become extraordinary, they might reach a kind of immortality among men.

Unfortunately for them and for so many other people, we find ourselves living in a democratic age. We all want to be extraordinary without seeing that to be extraordinary in a world where everyone is extraordinary is an impossibility--an absurdity. The advent of digital technology has only leveled things out even more. Now everyone can be a writer, an artist, a musician, a journalist, a philosopher, a theorist, a historian, a critic, and so on. Here I am writing a blog. My potential readership is in the billions. I could be a crackpot and still have more people read what I write than even the most popular authors of the pre-digital past. Everyone who reads my blog or any other blog can do the same thing. And because of that, no one stands out, for if there are billions of people but also billions of websites and blogs, who is there to read what you have written?

We all want to accomplish something or other and for our lives to have some kind of purpose and meaning. We all want to be esteemed and to have a kind of immortality as well. There was a time when everyone on earth, no matter how high or low, was esteemed, not necessarily by other people or even by himself, but by his Creator. Every person also held a position in his society or culture. Again, it might be high or low, but he knew and everyone else knew where he was and what his duties were. Finally, every person held a position in his family and was--potentially at least--esteemed by them. Even if he were not a patriarch--a king in his own family--he might be a prince. In all those things--by God, in society, in his own family--the individual was esteemed, and through all those things, he might attain a kind of immortality: he would live on in his children and grandchildren, his works would live on as well, as the work of countless nameless peasants and craftsmen lives on in Il Duomo di Milano, for instance, and most importantly his eternal soul would live on in communion with God.

But we decided we didn't want any of that. And in pursuit of our own personal happiness and fulfillment, I suspect we have made ourselves deeply unhappy and unfulfilled.

So what does all that have to do with dark fantasy?

First, as a writer or artist, if you can claim to be the inventor of a form or genre, you might earn the esteem of your fellow artists, as well as of critics and fans. You might also gain, in your own mind at least, a kind of immortality. As a critic or academic, if you can claim to have discovered the inventor of a form or genre, you might write a paper (published in some unread academic journal), thereby earning the esteem (more likely jealousy) of your fellows. In your own small way, you have uncovered one of the world's secrets, and you can hope that your name will live on forever because of it. The problem is that there is an ever-diminishing supply of really juicy secrets to be uncovered and ever-fewer new ideas and concepts to lay out before a reverent and appreciative world. Not only that, everyone else in your field is trying to do the same exact thing. And not only that, now that there's that damned Internet, everybody in the world can compete with you, too, even if they are completely lacking in credentials. How are you supposed to be extraordinary when everyone else is trying to be extraordinary, too?

Second, once you have cut yourself off from the past, from any kind of traditional and cohesive society, from your own family and the concept of family, and from God himself, how are you supposed to live? It's no wonder that there should be so many people who are so depressed, living in despair, negative, pessimistic, self-destructive, and nihilistic. It's no wonder that a man should shoot up a museum or crash an airplane into a mountainside. If there really is such a thing as dark fantasy, it exists because it suits a need among writers, critics, and academics to stand out somehow, but more to the point, it exists because it satisfies the desire of the reader to be affirmed in his negative and nihilistic view of himself, humanity, and the universe. There have always been and always will be nihilists. But I suspect that dark fantasy would have been undreamed of in a traditional society and culture, in other words, the society and culture that was finally put in its grave more than a hundred years ago by Darwin or Freud or Nietzsche or whatever other nineteenth or early twentieth century bugaboo you care to mention. In fact, I think dark fantasy, if it exists, is an invention of recent years, probably the last twenty-five to thirty years, the same period during which science fiction--a genre based on a faith in the infinite future--seems to have taken to its sickbed, and during which fantasy--a genre that is more or less about decadence--has become more popular, it seems certain, to suit our decadent age. Yes, Francis Stevens wrote about an ancient god who hates and seeks to destroy humanity, but Francis Stevens was not a nihilist. In the end, Colin O'Hara, "a good Catholic," wins out over that god, and love wins out over hate. If it were written today, and if it were indeed dark fantasy, The Citadel of Fear could not be hopeful and positive. As it is, it might very well have little appeal to readers who seem so eager to wallow in everything that is dark, violent, and nihilistic in the world.

To be continued . . .

The Argosy, September 14, 1918. The cover story is "Citadel of Fear" by Francis Stevens, the cover artist unknown. The female character is "The Moth Girl." Look for her again in the second part of this series.

This episode begins with two treasure hunters, Colin O'Hara and Archer Kennedy, being held prisoner by the people of Tlapallan, "the last remnant of a forgotten race, older than Toltec or Mayan, or even the Olmecs." (p. 43) As it turns out, Svend Bjornson, O'Hara and Kennedy's former host and captor, is a kind of guardian of the lost city and its people. Still, he is a modern man and a member of western civilization, and he has something in common with them. Meeting the captives in their cell, Bjornson offers a warning and the first inkling of the theme of The Citadel of Fear:

"Boy," [he says to O'Hara], "never bow your head to the gods of a strange race! Never! Not for beauty, nor love, nor wealth, nor friendship! Not for wonders, nor miracles! You speak of mysteries. There is a mystery I could tell you of--but your soul would be sick afterward--sick--you might even desert your Christ--as I did, God help me!" (p. 44)

Bjornson recounts his story, how he came Tlapallan and how he remained, even when he knew what it meant to remain:

"When I say that you are housed now in the seat of Nacoc-Yaotl it means nothing to you," [he says], "but to me it means threat of a terror that I never think of when I can avoid it! When I was first here, a prisoner, I, who had never given much thought to religion, used to spend whole nights in prayer, entreating God to make it untrue--or let me forget!"

Bjornson could have escaped from Tlapallan, seat of Nacoc-Yaotl, a god of the Tlapallans, but he did not go, for the attraction was too great. The implication is that he has given up his soul in exchange for what he once believed to be a greater reward.

There is a lot of escaping in The Citadel of Fear. Once again, O'Hara and Kennedy escape from their cell into the city of Tlapallan. They are astonished to find a great white lake, illuminated from below, its waters plied by the galleys of the Tlapallans. Here they separate, O'Hara drawn to light and water--symbols perhaps of life itself--Kennedy retreating into the dark, empty, and convoluted inner recesses of the city. There he stumbles onto a nightmarish and fantastic landscape, and in it, a niche in a wall, filled with an almost palpable darkness and inhabited by a black idol. Kennedy cannot tear himself away from the face of the idol:

It was not a good face. No evil, indeed, could have been too vile for its ugliness to grin at . . . . A tense, cruel grin it was, that had never heard of humor. Cruel and monstrously alert . . . . The eyes were slits, but they were watchful slits . . . . Had it witnessed torture, not the victim but the tormentor would have held its avid attention. Not pain, but cruelty, not vice but viciousness--and the corruption of all mankind could hardly have sated its ambition, nor the evil of a world-wide race of demons have quenched the desire behind its narrowed lids. (p. 66)

This, then, is Nacoc-Yaotl, "black maker of hatreds, who would destroy mankind if he could." (pp. 71-72) The image evokes in the mind of the reader who has read stories by H.P. Lovecraft the image of Cthulhu and his associates. Maybe that image made its way into the mind of Lovecraft himself in 1918, there to remain for nearly a decade before he wrote "The Call of Cthulhu" in 1926. (1)

The narrative continues:

In the natures of different men there are, as one might say, certain empty spaces. Voids that long to be filled. So one craves beauty, and another love, a third goodness, and a fourth, perhaps, mere lust of the senses.

Meeting these, the emptiness is filled and the man is happy. So, Kennedy. He had craved gold, but back of that desire was another and deeper lack--an emptiness unknown and unacknowledged, even by himself. The face of [Nacoc-Yaotl] filled it. (pp. 66-67)

Here, then, is a figure we might recognize, the materialist, desperately empty, desperate to believe in something, only too happy to fill his emptiness with the first compelling belief system he encounters, and desperate, too, to surrender himself and his freedom to the first entity who offers to relieve him of such burdens. Heedless of Bjornson's earlier warning, Kennedy gives to Nacoc-Yaotl "the perfect worship of a real devotee." (p. 76)

Kennedy and O'Hara spend another twenty-five pages in Tlapallan until Bjornson allows O'Hara to escape. Kennedy is still held captive in the city of Quetzacoatl--and Nacoc-Yaotl--and that's the last we see of him for awhile. Then, abruptly, on page 93, the story jumps forward fifteen years into the then-present, circa 1918, and the home of Colin O'Hara's almost anagramatically-named sister, Cliona O'Hara Rhodes, located in an eastern suburb named Charpentier. That break comes about one-third of the way through Francis Stevens' story, and it isn't only a break in time and place, but also in mood, plot, and genre. From a Lost Worlds adventure-fantasy, The Citadel of Fear moves into the territory of a mystery-thriller, increasingly into horror, as Cliona and her household are terrorized by the nighttime visitations of strange, frightening, and largely unseen creatures. There is a good deal of humor, including the introduction of an Inspector Lestrade kind of character in the police detective MacClellan. There is also some domestic melodrama and/or comedy perhaps meant to appeal to women readers after so many pages of the Mexican adventures of two scruffy treasure hunters. The Citadel of Fear is overlong in places, with too much space devoted to what appear to be inconsequential events and descriptions. Most of that is in the middle part of the book.

So if a story breaks at the one-third mark, you might look for another transition at the two-thirds mark. On first reading the book, I didn't detect the break, but there it is, on page 190, where Colin O'Hara sets off on his last visit to the estate of a Mr. Chester Reed, like Tlapallan a fantastic place, and located in the nearby village of Undine. Reed is an odd character and a kind of Dr. Moreau of the suburbs. He and O'Hara had met many chapters before. Again, as in her previous stories, Francis Stevens displayed a great faculty for imagining and describing strange, fantastic, and nightmarish places. Again there is a suggestion that a place has a personality, or expresses the personality of the person who inhabits or creates it. In the estate of Chester Reed, The Citadel of Fear reaches its climax, and its author, in an extraordinary dream-vision, foretells something of our time, and perhaps also of the world into which dark fantasy would be born.

To be concluded . . .

Notes

(1) The body of the idol is described as a thing that "squatted naked, and the fingers clasped about its drawn-up knees were long, and stealthy, and treacherous." (p. 66). There is a strong suggestion here of the image of the idol of Cthulhu in Lovecraft's story.

"The Citadel of Fear" was reprinted complete in Famous Fantastic Mysteries in February 1942. The cover was by Virgil Finlay.

The climax of The Citadel of Fear takes place in the estate of Chester T. Reed, a mad scientist type and master and creator of the creatures who have been terrorizing Cliona O'Hara Rhodes and her household. Her brother, Colin O'Hara, visits the estate one last time for a showdown with Reed. Although the phrase "citadel of fear" never appears in the story, it is for Reed's estate that the story is named. (1)

I say climax, but there are actually two climaxes in The Citadel of Fear. The first is thematic and takes the form of a dream-vision of Colin O'Hara as he lies unconscious or semi-conscious and a captive of Chester Reed. That thematic climax must have been unconventional in its day. I doubt that Francis Stevens' readers would have been well prepared for it. The second climax has to do with the plot and is much more conventional, although with its slam-bang action, pandemonium, conflagration, and--ultimately--complete destruction, stretched out over page after page, it reminds me of the special-effects extravaganzas you see at the movie theater these days, you know, the kind that never seems to end.

As I noted in Part Two of this article, The Citadel of Fear is divided into three parts: 1) the setup, about eighty pages worth, which takes place in Mexico and in Tlapallan; 2) the development, set in the fictional villages of Charpentier and Undine, another ninety pages or so; and 3) the climax (and a brief denouement) of about seventy-five pages, which takes place in Chester Reed's "fortress of fear" in Undine. (2) That's a long climax to be sure (maybe a little too long), but it's where the book comes into fruition.

The thematic climax in The Citadel of Fear--Colin O'Hara's dream-vision--comes when the god Quetzacoatl confronts Nacoc-Yaotl, the "creator of hatreds" and a god with "an enmity against the human race--an enmity darker and vaster than human enmity could ever be." (p. 204) (3) Chester Reed--better known as Archer Kennedy--has subdued his old friend O'Hara and prepares to change him into one of his nightmarish creatures. In the lead-up to that confrontation between god and god, Kennedy reveals himself in some very long passages:

"I worship nothing!' [Kennedy shouts] "Do you understand me? Nothing!" (p. 207)

He was loathsome, and inspired contempt [O'Hara thinks]. He was shallow, cheap, the shell of a man, empty of aught but petty egotism and a malice that had not even the redeeming dignity of greatness. (p. 212)

"I told you that I let imagination run away with me at first [continues Kennedy]. I swept and carried and toiled for them in fear and trembling! I! Till I began to use my reason, to remember that material effects have material causes, and I saw clear to the real god behind the sham ones . . . . The god I speak of is the only one of real power the world has ever known. I mean--science!" (p. 212)

Kennedy again: "Men bow to two powers--gold and fear! In the day when I am ready they will bow to only one, and that will be in my control. Gold! What's gold beside fear?" (p. 217)

And again: "Oh, there is a science of will as of matter." (p. 221)

And O'Hara's response to all this: "Any man who is fool enough to play with the devil's own process you've been describing, to try to explain it by a rigamarole of 'science', not to perceive the black power behind his own power--such a man is no more or less than an empty-head . . . !" (p. 220)

Then the dream-vision commences (on page 234), and Nacoc-Yaotl makes his case:

"Men made me what I am, and for that I hate them! In all Anahuac [Mexico under the Aztecs] there was no mercy among them. In the shrieks of the bloody sacrifice, in the cries of babes murdered upon my altars, in the steam that arose from the unspeakable feast, the mirror of Tezcatlipoca was fouled and dimmed; Telpuctli grew black, old and cruel!" (p. 237) (5)

states his aim:

"Free runs my will today and freer shall it run tomorrow. Hate breeds hate, and demon produces demon. How fast have their numbers increased! He [Kennedy] is pleased like a child, and believes that he shall rule the world! He! That empty, hollow reed through which my will runs!

"But through all, and despite his coward soul, I have brought this blind slave of mine to dare that for which I waited through the centuries. We have come at last to the utter corruption of man!" (p. 238)

and then makes a prophecy that has come down through nearly a century to the present day, into the real world in which we all now live:

"In the day of full corruption, and when each hater shall wear the foul outer form of his hatred, who, think you, will be best worshipped of the gods?" (p. 238)

Despite Nacoc-Yaotl's power, he is defeated, Kennedy and his monsters are consumed in fire and destruction, and Colin O'Hara, the woman he loves, and the rest of humanity are saved. In the end, "[h]aving met nothing to shake his faith in either his universe or his God, [O'Hara] remained a good Catholic, and the Dusk Lady [the woman he loves] was duly baptized into that church . . . ." (p. 269) The two are married and they seem pretty certain to live happily ever after.

* * *

The claim is that Francis Stevens--Gertrude Barrows Bennett--created dark fantasy. It's clear that the ancient, powerful, and hostile entity of dark fantasy is present in The Citadel of Fear. It's even more clear that Stevens was not a nihilist, atheist, or materialist, and did not sympathize with those causes. On the contrary, her sympathies are with the forces of good and with her "good Catholic" hero, his sister, and humanity in general. The villain is Archer Kennedy, a materialist and a nihilist ("I worship nothing!"). Moreover, he is a subscriber to what is now called Scientism, the religion of science, and a man who seeks to impose his will---through fear--upon the world. With the appearance of Nacoc-Yaotl, Kennedy's worldview, in which materialism, science, and a human will-to-power are supreme, falls apart, for Nacoc-Yaotl is a supernatural force and in the end is defeated only by other supernatural forces. Kennedy is a mere pawn. It's clear here also where the author's sympathies lie.

We are now living in a world created by men like Archer Kennedy: small, hollow, empty-headed, egotistical, but burning with an ambition to impose their will upon the rest of us. Science is their highest belief. Atheism, materialism, nihilism, and similar -isms are their religions. They and their followers worship a god of hatred. Like Kennedy, they are merely the tools of something darker still, an ancient force of evil and corruption. And like Kennedy, they fail to see it. Nacoc-Yaotl, "creator of hatreds," is one name for the force that hates humanity and wishes to corrupt and destroy us. It goes by other names as well. In a remarkable bit of prophecy, Francis Stevens foresaw a time when he would be "the best worshipped of the gods." That time may very well be now. And dark fantasy may very well be a genre for that time, written as it is, more significantly read as it is, by people who may have more in common with Archer Kennedy than with Colin O'Hara or Francis Stevens. We should all ask ourselves: would we rather be good, loving, faithful, heroic, and courageous? Or would we rather worship nothing and be filled with corruption and hatred, for ourselves and the rest of humanity?

* * *

The Citadel of Fear is Francis Stevens longest, most complex, and most sophisticated work to date. I'm not sure that I will read anything else by her to top it. If you decide to read The Citadel of Fear, be aware that the book is long, that its author goes on a little too much in certain places, and that her style is old-fashioned. In the end, I hope you will find the book worth it.

The Citadel of Fear by Francis Stevens (1970), with an introduction by Sam Moskowitz and cover art by Steele Savage. Note the Moth Girl again.

Notes
(1) The phrase used in the story is "fortress of fear."
(2) The symbolism in the name Undine is pretty straightforward: an undine is a supernatural or mythological being--usually female--associated with water. Chester Reed's creatures live in an artificial swamp or marsh, but the word undine more likely applies to his supposed daughter, with whom Colin O'Hara has fallen in love. The name Charpentier is harder to puzzle out. Charpentier is the French word for carpenter. It might be a little too obvious to connect that to Jesus, the carpenter of Nazareth.
(3) The quote is from Svend Bjornson, who has made a reappearance. He goes on: "Can you believe, child, that there are gods of old who still live? Old gods, and powers that have survived the passing of their worshippers?" (p. 204) Again, images of the Cthulhu Mythos pop into my head.
(5) Tezcatlipoca is an epithet for Nacoc-Yaotl. I don't know the meaning of Telpuctli.

Original text copyright 2015 Terence E. Hanley

"Behind the Curtain" is a short story originally published in All-Story Weekly, September 21, 1918, and reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, January 1940. In The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (2004), it takes up a mere seven pages.

"Behind the Curtain" is short, also simple, a tale of revenge in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe. The author even mentions Poe in her story, and her two characters, Santallos the narrator, and Quentin, his guest, drink of Amontillado. Santallos is a collector of Egyptian antiquities, including mummies and mummy cases. You might say he's wrapped up in his hobby, so much so that he neglects his wife. Naturally she falls into the arms of the younger man, Quentin. Santallos concocts a fiendish kind of revenge. Poe might have twisted the story one way. Francis Stevens chose to twist it another. A more conventional author would have left it untwisted. There is, I think, a feminine sensibility in the twist, despite the fact that the narrator is a man and the story was written by a woman who signed her stories with a masculine pseudonym.

* * *

As the saying goes, the golden age of science fiction is twelve. Born on September 18, 1883, Gertrude Barrows turned twelve in 1895. During the year in which she lived that golden age (and perhaps in the few months before and after--I don't know the exact dates of publication), Henry Altemus of Philadelphia issued a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's stories entitled Weird Tales (1), and The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells and The Well at the World's End by William Morris came out of England. Francis Stevens was clearly inspired and influenced by Poe--as in "Behind the Curtain"--and Wells--as in the Doctor Moreau-like character Archer Kennedy in The Citadel of Fear. (2) I can also see the influence of nineteenth and early twentieth century detective stories and tales of Lost Worlds after H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, again in The Citadel of Fear. We might ask how Gertrude Barrows left such a mark in her very brief career writing fantasy. Maybe it all goes back to a golden age during which she read Poe and Wells, as so many of us have done in our adolescence.

Notes

(1) There is reason to believe the later magazine (1923) was named for Poe's Weird Tales of 1895.

(2) The influence of H.G. Wells is even more pronounced in The Heads of Cerberus (1919). Stay tuned.

Virgil Finlay's illustration for "Behind the Curtain" by Francis Stevens, from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, January 1940. Note how the wrappings are strategically placed to cover up certain parts of the female anatomy. That happened a lot in pulp art.

"Unseen--Unfeared" is a short story originally published in People's Favorite Magazine for February 10, 1919. It was Francis Stevens first story published after the end of the Great War, and there seems to be a cloud hanging over it, perhaps a cloud of awareness or an inkling of what had gone on in Europe over the previous four years and more. In the end, that cloud is dispelled and life is affirmed. The story is in five sections and takes up fifteen pages in The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (2004).

Longer than "Behind the Curtain," the story "Unseen--Unfeared" is also more complex, more innovative, and I think more enjoyable. As with so many of Stevens' stories, "Unseen--Unfeared" is a hybrid. It begins and ends as a detective tale, but there are elements of fantasy, science fiction, and the ghost story in between. It approaches what people now call dark fantasy, but then backs away with an affirmation of the essential goodness and immeasurable value of human beings. It also has something in common with later stories by H.P. Lovecraft. Maybe he read it. More likely, tales like those written by Stevens and Lovecraft were in the making during the 1910s and '20s. The Germans, who were then entering into a period of decadence, call such a thing zeitgeist.

"Unseen--Unfeared" is set in the then-present and takes place in a large city, probably New York City or Philadelphia. The story opens and closes with conversations between the narrator, Blaisdell, and his "ever-interesting friend," Mark Jenkins, a police detective. The subject of their conversations is Doc Holt, "an amateur chemist and dabbler in different sorts of research work." (p. 213) Bracketed within these conversations is the narrator's account of a terrifying experience in a kind of laboratory/lecture hall located in a private home with Blaisdell as the sole member of the audience. The lecturer is an odd and frightening scientist--one guess as to who he is. By carefully explained (pseudo)scientific means, Blaisdell sees visions of monsters that--though invisible to us--inhabit the same space that we inhabit. The kicker is that these monsters are created by man "[o]ut of the ether . . . . By his evil thoughts, by his selfish panics, by his lusts and his interminable, never-ending hate he has made them, and they are everywhere!" (p. 221) Blaisdell resolves to abolish his "monster-creating self," (p. 222) but is interrupted in the nick of time by Jenkins the detective. In the end, coming out of his state of fear and dread, Blaisdell refuses "to ever again believe in the depravity of the human race." (p. 225) (1, 2)

Stevens' story has a Scooby-Doo kind of ending, but things aren't tied up completely with a rational explanation. There is still doubt--more than a little doubt--as to whether such an explanation is adequate. "Unseen--Unfeared" is science fiction, more accurately science fantasy. Just as in The Citadel of Fear, science and reason seem to explain things, but then something beyond science shows itself to be more powerful and closer to the real nature of the world and of human beings.

Human hatred seems to be a developing theme in the stories of Francis Stevens. Again and again, she turns away from hatred and towards "the goodness and kindliness of the human countenance." (p. 225) It's worth noting that in "Unseen--Unfeared," Blaisdell, in his state of fear, turns his thoughts against the "Italians, Jews, and . . . negroes"(p. 213) he sees in the street. "Oh, no," I thought as I was reading the story. It reminded me of nothing so much as "The Horror at Red Hook" by H.P. Lovecraft. The difference is that Stevens' narrator has fallen into a drug-induced state of fear and dread. In the end he recovers himself and embraces his fellow man.

"Unseen--Unfeared" puts me in mind of H.P. Lovecraft's work in other ways. Lovecraft was of course a materialist and probably would not have delved into a supernatural explanation as Stevens did. I can hardly imagine him closing a story with words like these:

. . . doubt is sometimes better than certainty, and there are marvels better left unproved. Those, for instance, which concern the Powers of Evil. (p. 126)

That may be the same idea as the mind not correlating all of its contents, but certainty and proof are in the province of science. The Powers of Evil inhabit the space beyond. I wonder now if Lovecraft ever used the concept of supernatural evil in his stories, or if the threats he imagined against humanity were always material, or at the very least, not in any way suggestive of God and the devil and their ongoing struggle for the human soul.

Unlike Lovecraft's stories, "Unseen--Unfeared" does not end with death, destruction, or disaster. It is affirmative rather than pessimistic or downbeat. The concept of invisible monsters and a scientific way of rendering them visible reminds me of "From Beyond" by H.P. Lovecraft, written in 1920. Was there influence of one upon the other, or, again, was this merely the zeitgeist? After all, Einsteinian relativity and talk of multiple dimensions was in the air in 1919. Invisible monsters had previously shown up in "What Was It? A Mystery" by Fitz-James O'Brien (1859), "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant (1887), and "The Damned Thing" by Ambrose Bierce (1893). The seed of interdimensional or intradimensional invisibility may have come from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott (1884), a pretty well indispensable book.

If there was a spirit of the times, Francis Stevens appears to have partaken of the positive and affirmative parts. She seems to have been a woman of faith, as opposed to Lovecraft the materialist, who seems to have held such dim views of humanity and our place in the universe. The difference may be explained very well by biography. Unfortunately, biographical information on Francis Stevens--Gertrude Barrows Bennett--is sorely lacking. We're left with the stories themselves. So the continuing question is this: Did Francis Stevens create dark fantasy? If dark fantasy is negative, pessimistic, or nihilistic, the answer is still no.

Notes
(1) There may be an analogy here to the war years, but if there is, it's only in the mood of the story and of the times and not in any way overt in the story.
(2) In The Citadel of Fear, the god-monster Nacoc-Yaotl comes to hate humanity because they have made him what he is by their hateful and violent ways. In "Unseen--Unfeared" Francis Stevens took that idea a step further, for the invisible monsters in the story are manifestations of human hatred. In dark fantasy, the monster supposedly comes from the outside. He predates humanity and may be entirely indifferent to us. He certainly isn't created by us, just as Cthulhu wasn't created by us.

Francis Stevens had more than her share of space on the covers of pulp magazines in her brief career, but that wasn't the case in February 1919 when her story "Unseen--Unfeared" was published in People's Favorite Magazine. The cover artist is unknown.

A long time ago, British historian, author, and television personality James Burke hosted a show called Connections in which he wandered through history making connections among seemingly disparate and unconnected events. It was a good show and he was a great host. It's always fascinating to me to see a great mind at work and to read history with a thesis rather than as just a chronicle of events. One of the points of Connections is that historical events have not taken place in isolation, rather, they should be seen and can best be understood in a historical and cultural context.

Fans of science fiction and fantasy prefer to escape from the facts of history, biography, and personality. It's why we read and why it's called escapist literature. The problem is that science fiction and fantasy do not and cannot exist in isolation, separate from their historical and cultural context. Likewise, escapist literature cannot be separated from the biographies of its individual authors. Those facts are among the reasons I write this blog, to place science fiction and fantasy in historical context and to tell something of the biography of the creators of these genres. As writers, readers, and fans, we would prefer not to be bound by history or fact. Instead, we would like to escape. But we should all realize as every person must realize in his or her life that there can be no escape from living.

The last time I wrote, I looked at the story "Unseen-Unfeared" by Francis Stevens (1919). It's a story about invisible monsters that are incarnated through human hatred and violence. The theme in Stevens' work of the monster created by humanity goes back to her novel, The Citadel of Fear (1918). Both stories are in the end positive and life-affirming. They may be fantasy, but they are not dark.

The supposition is that Francis Stevens was the creator of the sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of dark fantasy. I haven't found any really good evidence of that yet, but then the term itself, dark fantasy, is ill-defined and seems to be whatever one person or another wants it to be. Dark seems to be the operative word, as dark fantasy is apparently dark, negative, pessimistic, and nihilistic. It involves malevolent forces from the outside that seek to corrupt and destroy humanity. In our materialistic age, that means creatures from other times, other places, or other dimensions. In other words, they are not supernatural in origin, as we in this age won't allow such a thing. In a time of believers, fantasy, it seems to me, would have been the age-old story of good versus evil, of God versus the devil. It would have been clear to all just who was the Good Guy and who was the bad guy. That, at least, was true until science put God into his grave in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. With dark fantasy, writers, readers, and fans seem to have switched sides and to identify with the powers of darkness rather than Light.

With all that in mind, I realized that there was a concept of invisible monsters or invisible evil in American literature before Francis Stevens and H.P. Lovecraft, before Ambrose Bierce and Fitz-James O'Brien. I remembered my high school days and reading Wonders of the Invisible World by Cotton Mather (1693). This is where the connections begin.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728), like John Dee (1527-1608 or 1609) and Joseph Glanvil (1636-1680), whom I quoted recently (by way of Edgar Allan Poe), was a practitioner of pneumatology. That's a new word for me, and I had to look it up. According to Wikipedia, "pneumatology is the study of spiritual beings and phenomena." All three men found their way into the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. It's worth mentioning that Mather was also a scientist who advocated for inoculation against smallpox. The germ theory of disease was still far in the future, but it seems that Mather was interested in the invisible world of the spirit and of organisms invisible to the naked eye.

There isn't any evidence that Francis Stevens sought to connect a seventeenth-century dissertation on witchcraft in New England to events contemporaneous to her own life. But I wonder if in one way or another she updated the concept of an invisible evil to the twentieth century and introduced a very old idea into a newly forming genre, science fiction. There is reason to believe that Francis Stevens--Gertrude Barrows Bennett--was a Catholic. If that was the case, I wonder, too, how receptive she would have been to the very Protestant and very Puritan ideas of Cotton Mather. Finally, I wonder if dark fantasy is simply a genre that is essentially theological in nature but with God and devil (ideas that are considered naive and unsophisticated today) removed, only to be replaced by material forces. If that's true, then Francis Stevens--if she was indeed an author of dark fantasy--would have come before the break from the theological past into a materialistic present. If that's the case, then it hardly makes any sense to say that she created the genre attributed to her.

It also occurred to me that the invisible creature spawned by human hatred, jealousy, and destructiveness reappeared, so to speak, in the movie Forbidden Planet from 1956. By then the creature was explained in purely materialistic terms as a monster of the Id manifested with the aid of vast and powerful machinery. Many of Freud's ideas are now considered politically incorrect or simply invalid, but in the 1950s, Freudian psychology was wildly popular and I think carried a kind of scientific cachet. It's no wonder that it found its way into science fiction. Heck, even Dianetics, the root of a science-fiction religion, is made up in part of Freudianism. The irony is that Marx, who was an out-and-out crackpot, has adherents today, while Freud has fallen out of favor, despite the usefulness of some of his ideas. The double irony is that the political correctness that has gone against Freud grew, I believe, out of a marriage of his ideas to those of Marx in the forms of critical theory and the schemes of the New Left.

The race that created the machines in Forbidden Planet were called the Krell. The source of their great power is subterranean. The name evokes, if ever so slightly, the subject of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's romance of 1871, Vril, the Power of the Coming Race. The Vril is the power, also subterranean. The people who wield that power are the Vril-Ya, which word seems to have been the source of H.P. Lovecraft's name for his submarine city, R'lyeh, in "The Call of Cthulhu." Bulwer-Lytton's book also influenced the Theosophists (who were mentioned in "The Call of Cthulhu"). They in turn seem to have influenced Raymond A. Palmer in his peddling of the so-called Shaver Mystery and perhaps even L. Ron Hubbard, an even greater huckster than Palmer, who invented a quasi-Freudian Dianetics and a quasi-religious Scientology. Forbidden Planet is said to have influenced the making of the television series Star Trek (1966). In one episode, "The Ultimate Computer," human "engrams" are encoded in the eponymous machine. Engram is of course a term from Dianetics and Scientology. The Krell's machinery, like the Vril-Ya's technology before it, might easily be called "the ultimate computer" as well. The Mathison E-meter is a pretty meager gadget by comparison. (1)

So, Karl Marx, Theosophy, Raymond A. Palmer, L. Ron Hubbard, and to a lesser extent Sigmund Freud attempted to uncover or explain earth's secret history, each in more or less materialistic terms. Cotton Mather had his own non-material explanation for historical forces. Poor Francis Stevens, whom hardly anyone remembers, relied on a very old and very simple explanation. She laid the blame instead at the feet of a corrupt humanity and its influencing "Powers of Evil."

The connections continue: There are those who explain witches and even zombies by material means. This is, after all, the era of Scientism in which all things are or can be explained by science. One of those means is by ingestion of jimsonweed, a highly toxic plant that grows in old barn lots, hog lots, and other waste places here in the Midwest. If jimsonweed is only one of many material sources of altered states of consciousness, morality, or being, then Cotton Mather's ideas are rendered obsolete. After all, in an era of Scientism, there can't be any supernatural or non-material explanations for human conduct.

Another name for jimsonweed is thornapple. You and I ran across that word recently in our reading. You will remember that Lee Brown Coye passed through an area overgrown with pines and thornapple trees on his way to a house of horrors in central New York State. I take that name, thornapple, to mean hawthorn, a small tree with apple-like fruits and thorny twigs. Hawthorn is common on old-field sites, as Coye's woods seem to have been. But there is a suggestion of the name of that far less innocuous plant that I have called jimsonweed. That suggestion gives a whole new meaning to Coye's tale, and to the story "Sticks," adapted by Karl Edward Wagner, who was a psychiatrist, a nihilist, possibly an atheist, and the one who may very well have coined the term dark fantasy.

Notes

(1) Speaking of the E-meter, I think people undergoing auditing grip cylindrical electrodes in their hands. If I remember right, I read a story that early auditors might even have used tomato cans as the electrodes. That makes me think of Mr. Haney, from Green Acres, who very famously said, "Don't look in the termator can!" It also makes me think of the "time machine" from Napoleon Dynamite, the title character of which was, like L. Ron Hubbard, Lee Brown Coye, and Karl Edward Wagner, a redhead. Here's another quote from Wikipedia: "Montague Summers, in his translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, notes that red hair and green eyes were thought to be the sign of a witch, a werewolf or a vampire during the Middle Ages." Readers of H.P. Lovecraft have of course heard of the Malleus Maleficarum. In some of the images of Cotton Mather on the Internet, his hair is suspiciously ruddy in hue.

I would like to take a break from my series on Francis Stevens and write a little on Franz Nabl and the Austrian P.E.N. Club. There are actually two tellers of weird tales in this story, one at the beginning and one near the end. Franz Nabl comes at the beginning.

I have written about Franz Nabl before, on October 24, 2013. You can read that article by clicking here. Lars Dangel provided the information that linked Franz Habl, the name listed in Jaffery and Cook's index to the writers and artists in Weird Tales, to Franz Nabl, the real Austrian author. Once you know his real name, it's easy to find information on him.

According to Herbert Herzmann in Major Figures of Austrian Literature: The Interwar Years 1918-1938 (1995), Franz Nabl was born on July 16, 1883, in Litschau, Bohemia, now in Austria. (In my earlier article, I had his birthplace as Lautschin, Austria-Hungary, now Loučeň, a city in the Czech Republic. That information came from the German version of Wikipedia.) Nabl's father, also named Franz, was the manager of an estate owned by the German Princely House of Thurn und Taxis. The elder Franz retired early and acquired his own estate, Gstettenhof, in Lower Austria. That's where Franz Nabl the son spent most of his childhood.

Franz Nabl studied law at Vienna University but left before attaining his degree. In 1905 (according to Mr. Hertzmann), he married Hermengild Lampa and about that time became a freelance writer. Nabl suffered from poor health, thus avoiding military service during the Great War. He was editor of Grazer Tagblatt from 1924 to 1927, but the success of a play freed him from the need for regular work and he returned to freelance writing. Mr. Herzmann describes the main theme and thrust of Nabl's work:

Most of his narratives tell of the attempt of an individual to free himself or herself from the restrictions of the environment in order to achieve something like autonomy, autarky, self-sufficiency, or freedom . . . . The notion of "Wiedergeburt" (rebirth) plays a decisive role in [his work]. [One of his characters explains that] each one of us . . . is sooner or later faced with the decision of whether to undergo rebirth. If we decide for it, we must annihilate ("vernichten") all remains of our former self. (1)

Franz Nabl wrote nineteen plays and books published from 1905 to 1990. He died on January 19, 1974, in Graz, at age ninety.

I am revisiting the biography of Franz Nabl, whose main body of work was published before Word War II, because of a controversy of today, in fact, of this week. Nabl was a member of the Austrian P.E.N. Club, a branch of the international organization of poets, essayists, and novelists. In May 1933--eighty-two years ago this month--the International P.E.N. Club held its 11th annual congress in Ragusa, Italy, now Dubrovnik, Croatia. Earlier that month, the German Student Union had burned thousands of books in Berlin.

When the Austrian PEN delegation introduced a resolution condemning the students' action [wrote Donald G. Daviau], the German representatives walked out of the meeting in protest, accompanied by the Austrians Grete von Urbanitzky, head of the Austrian group, Felix Salten, the publisher Paul Zsolnay, Egon Caesar Corti[,] who even at this early juncture was a convinced National Socialist, and others. (2)

The split became permanent the following month when a number of pro-Austrian members of the Austrian P.E.N. Club passed a resolution "defending intellectual freedom and condemning the abolition of human rights and the persecution of writers in Nazi Germany." (3) A dozen and a half (or more) writers resigned from the club in protest. Franz Nabl was among them. Although Nabl never joined the Nazi party,

there is no doubt that he allowed the new regime [after the Anschluss in 1938] to support and use him, at least partly because of the views he held at the time. (4)

Mr. Herzmann described those views as "increasingly authoritarian and even reactionary" as the 1930s progressed. Although Nabl's reputation was restored somewhat after the war, it will probably always exist under the shadow of Nazism.

This week, on May 5, 2015, at the PEN Literary Gala in New York City, PEN America will bestow upon the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award. You would think that would not be a controversial award, but we now live in an age in which all things are politicized. One hundred forty-five members of PEN have signed a letter objecting to the award, believing, I suppose, that continuing to exercise one's freedom of expression under very serious threats of violence that prove to be more than mere threats does not constitute sufficient courage. Novelist Peter Carey specifically objects to "PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population." (5) Just as the pro-German writers of the Austrian P.E.N. Club decided in favor of the suppression of free thought and free expression in 1933, so, too, do 145 members of PEN International today. Incredibly, Joyce Carol Oates is among them.

Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1937, in Lockport, New York, and received her bachelor's degree from Syracuse University (1960) and her master's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1961). Her first book was a collection of short stories entitled By the North Gate, published in 1963. Ms. Oates is considered a mainstream writer, but like innumerable writers in the American mainstream, she has delved into the Gothic tradition. (I'm not sure that American literature is separable from Gothicism.) TheInternet Speculative Fiction Database lists her stories and essays in the fields of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. They go back to her first published work. In 1997, Ecco Press published Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, selected and introduced by Ms. Oates. Her connections to Weird Tales go deeper than that, with works of fiction and non-fiction appearing in the newer incarnations of the magazine.

Peter Carey it seems has succumbed to politically correct idiocy. Joyce Carol Oates' comments on the PEN controversy are pretty mild in comparison, but I think they also represent a misunderstanding that people have about cartoonists and humorists in general. (6) I won't go into any great length. I will just say that it's obvious to me that Charlie Hebdo is not racist (the leftist's favorite cry), that in fact it is an equal-opportunity offender, and that everybody ought to just calm down and get a sense of humor. The next thing you know, people will start calling Blazing Saddles racist and want to shoot holes into Mel Brooks, one of our great national treasures. But then there have always been people who have wanted to shoot holes into people like Mel Brooks (and Felix Salten and Paul Zsolnay and Joyce Carol Oates' grandmother). In 1933, they were called Nazis. Today they go by a different name. Then and now, they had supporters, defenders, and apologists. It's just too bad that writers--supposedly thoughtful, well-educated, intelligent people--are among them.

Notes

(1) "Franz Nabl" by Herbert Herzmann in Major Figures of Austrian Literature: The Interwar Years 1918-1938, edited by Donald G. Daviau (Ariadne Press, 1995), p. 299.

(2) From "Introduction" by Donald G. Daviau in Major Figures of Austrian Literature: The Interwar Years 1918-1938 (Ariadne Press, 1995), p. 62.

(3) Ditto, p. 63.

(4) Herzmann, p. 318.

(5) From "Six PEN Members Decline Gala After Award for Charlie Hebdo" by Jennifer Schuessler on the website of PEN America, here.
(6) You can read her little tweets about the whole PEN/Charlie Hebdo affair in an article called "Joyce Carol Oates, Francine Prose, and Salman Rushdie Speak Out about Charlie Hebdo PEN Award" by Isabella Biedenharn on the website of Entertainment (Apr. 30, 2015), here.

You can read more about the controversy on my blog, Indiana Illustrators and Hoosier Cartoonists, here.

Franz Nabl (1883-1974)

In The Citadel of Fear (1918) and "Unseen-Unfeared" (1919), Francis Stevens made what may have been her closest approach to what is now called dark fantasy. It's probably no mere coincidence that both stories were published in late 1918 as the Great War was coming to an end and early 1919 as peace was being made. The war was of course a nightmare and a disaster. You could not have blamed a sensitive artist for reflecting horrors upon her world. But Stevens chose a different way: love over hate, goodness over corruption, light over darkness. There can be little doubt that Francis Stevens was not the creator of dark fantasy. To say that she was seems to me a twenty-first century and very academic conceit.

"The Elf Trap" is only further evidence that Francis Stevens was a teller of bright rather than dark tales. It was first published in Argosy, July 5, 1919, and reprinted in Fantastic Novels Magazine for November 1949. It's a long short story of twenty-one pages in The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (2004) but one of the simplest of Stevens' stories to date. The structure of the story is somewhat complex however. In reading her work, I have come to expect that. Built like a puzzle box or assembled like a set of nesting wooden dolls, it includes a double framing device and the voices of two narrators. Relativity was in the news in 1919. Analytic cubism was a leading movement in art. It's no wonder that stories told from multiple viewpoints would make their way into modern literature. One of John Dos Passos' trilogy U.S.A., a modernist work to be sure, was in fact called 1919. That was no coincidence, either. Anyway, as you read "The Elf Trap," you wonder how this story will work itself out, where lies reality, and how a man's death can make for a happy ending. That ending is a mild surprise, and the story itself is a pleasant reading experience. I might add that it could have been written only by a woman.

"The Elf Trap" takes place mostly in the mountains of North Carolina, where the main character, Theron Tademus, has gone for some much needed rest. Francis Stevens had a way with proper nouns, and there seems to be some deeper meaning in the man's name. If there is, it remains hidden to me. Nearby Tademus' mountain cabin is an artist's colony called Carcassonne, another name that seems meaningful, maybe by association with the city Carcosa, from the works of Robert W. Chambers. (The King in Yellow was published in 1895, the year of Gertrude Barrows' golden age of twelve.) Unlike most of Francis Stevens' other stories, "The Elf Trap" is a simple fantasy. On the other hand, it involves a kind of dream-vision or altered state of consciousness or reality, and so keeps with that recurring theme in her work.

"The Elf Trap" reminds me of Brigadoon in that an ordinary man undergoes an extraordinary experience upon encountering a magical village and its magical people. The man, Tademus, is a scientist and so rational, materialist, and disengaged from living among humanity, whom he finds ugly and repellant. He has no appreciation for or understanding of art. He has never danced nor loved. Theron Tademus doesn't know what Francis Stevens has in store for him.

In "The Elf Trap," Tademus travels beyond the veil of hard reality into the deeper reality of the spirit. It is a love story in which love and art triumph over science and materialism. Love comes in the form of Elva, a young woman who wears a scarf of sky blue and adorns herself with yellow honeysuckle. For a week, Tademus escapes from his mundane life into her magic. He is called back by his love of science. (He is a microbiologist studying the local protista.) Elva responds:

"You are all alike!" she cried. "All! You talk of love, but your love is for gold, or freedom, or some pitiful, foolish nothingness like that speck of life you call by a long name--and leave me for!"

Tademus returns to his life in science. What he doesn't know is that Elva and her people have fashioned an elf trap for him. He can escape from it once, but he will be caught again, and so Theron Tademus is saved from science and for love and art.

Hardly the stuff of dark fantasy.

"The Heads of Cerberus" by Francis Stevens was first published as a five-part serial in the short-lived magazine The Thrill Book, from August 15 to October 15, 1919. It was reprinted in book form by Polaris Press in 1952 and in a facsimile edition by Dover Publications in 2014. The Dover edition has preserved the original four-page introduction by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach and the original illustrations by Ric Binkley. It's a slim book of 190 numbered pages, but because the story is novel-length, I will italicize the title from here on out.

One of the most interesting things to come out of Eshbach's introduction is that there were at least three stories by Francis Stevens that went unpublished: The Bronze Chest, "a sheer fantasy of novel length"; "Beyond the Pallid Wall," a short story that may have been published under another title, "though this doesn't seem too likely"; and "Impulse," another short story announced by The Thrill Book in its last issue, October 15, 1919. (1, 2) I would like to think that Francis Stevens' manuscripts are out there somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered. More likely they are gone forever.

The Heads of Cerberus was an innovation when it was published in 1919, and may still have been unmatched in 1952 when Polaris Press reprinted it. In explaining the innovation, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach quoted P. Schuyler Miller:

"The Heads of Cerberus can be read as perhaps the first work of fantasy to envisage the parallel-time-track concept, with an added variation that so far as I know has not been reused since." (p. 15)

The variation of which Miller wrote is that those parallel time tracks seem to be moving at different rates, in which case the interlude (a weird episode in an otherwise straightforward tale) between the current time track (set in 1918) and the future time track (set in 2118) makes some kind of sense. Whatever the case may be, The Heads of Cerberus is a story of real complexity and sophistication. In the mere two and a half years since "The Nightmare" was published, Francis Stevens had come a long way. As in previous stories, the explanation behind the events in The Heads of Cerberus is balanced between science and the non-material (whether psychological, supernatural, or spiritual). A deep question arises as a result, namely: Just what is real and what exists solely in the minds of the protagonists? Neither Lloyd Arthur Eshbach nor P. Schuyler Miller had an answer. Miller considered The Heads of Cerberus a riddle.

Expecting a parallel-time-track story, you follow The Heads of Cerberus wondering when it will get there, for it seems to be a straight-ahead tale of time travel. In that, Francis Stevens was probably inspired by H.G. Wells. The Heads of Cerberus also has a good deal in common with Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy (1888). Some people have read The Time Machine as a satire, while Looking Backward seems to have been written in earnest. The Heads of Cerberus may have been written as a satire as well, not only of the then-current society, but also of Looking Backward. In any case, Looking Backward is famously utopian, while The Heads of Cerberus is distinctly dystopian, and in that, the unsung author Gertrude Barrows Bennett seems to have outdone her competition. After all, she lived in the Progressive Era when everything was going to be wonderful, yet she envisioned the perfect future not as a paradise but as a nightmare of human stupidity and lust for power.

Anyway, the explanation of the parallel-time-track concept, such as it is, comes very near the end of the story. Otherwise the reader is left to follow the exploits of the four characters from today in the nightmarish and somewhat comical world of tomorrow. But here's another innovation: Awhile back, I was looking for the first totalitarian in literature. I found two candidates, the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1879–1880), and the Benefactor or Well-Doer from We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921). The problem with the Grand Inquisitor is that he is not actually a character in a book but a character created by a character in a book. In my little survey, that leaves Zamyatin's Benefactor. Well, The Heads of Cerberus was published in 1919, and in it the author described a revolting creature called "Justice Supreme" or the "Supreme Servant," in his person a totalitarian ruler and very probably the first of his kind in American literature--maybe in all of literature. So the search for the first totalitarian is pushed back two years, from 1921 to 1919, and from a Russian author with firsthand knowledge of totalitarianism to an American pulp writer who seems to have relied mostly on her own intuition in predicting the world of tomorrow.

To be concluded . . .

Notes

(1) The titles and quotes are on page 15 of the Dover edition.

(2) "Beyond the Pallid Wall" reminds me of the title of one of H.P. Lovecraft's stories, "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" (1919).

The Thrill Book, August 15, 1919, with Francis Stevens' serial "The Heads of Cerberus" as the cover story. The man in the picture is holding a small vial with the Heads of Cerberus as the design on the stopper. Inside is the mysterious gray powder that, when inhaled, transports the main characters to the world of the future. I guess I should point out that drugs and altered states of consciousness are a recurring theme in Francis Stevens' work. That may or may not be significant.

The man's getup here isn't exactly true to the story, but you've got to grab the reader's attention somehow or other. The cover artist was Sidney H. Riesenberg (1885-1971).

The Heads of Cerberus is a book rich in insight. I have already written much about Francis Stevens--maybe too much--so other than the following miscellany, I would simply urge you to read the book, for it might tell us something about where we're going.

One of the heroes of The Heads of Cerberus is Terence "Terry" Trenmore, a big, brawling Irish Catholic like Colin O'Hara before him. I wonder now if Gertrude Barrows was from an Irish Catholic family and if she based her heroes on her father. (Or her brother. Both Colin and Terry have spirited sisters who are along for the adventure. Maybe that was Gertrude putting herself into her stories.)

The story takes place in the Philadelphia of 1918 and in the Philadelphia of 2118. In going from the present to the future, the main characters pass through a strange, dreamlike landscape called Ulithia. During World War II, the U.S. Navy built an enormous base at an atoll it called Ulithi. There is almost certainly no connection between these two names, but what are we supposed to make of something like this?

In going from Ulithia to the world of 2118, the main characters pass through a "moon gate." Upon arriving in the future Philadelphia, they look back to see a blank brick wall behind them. That reminds me of the Star Trek episode "All Our Yesterdays" in which Kirk is accused of witchcraft in an Earth-like past, while Spock and McCoy freeze to death in a prehistoric ice age.

In 1952, the same year in which Polaris reprinted The Heads of Cerberus, Taylor Caldwell published her own dystopian novel, The Devil's Advocate. Like Stevens' book, this one is set in Philadelphia. It is satirical to a point but also far more serious--and far longer--than The Heads of Cerberus. Note that both titles refer to the underworld.

Shortly after I read The Heads of Cerberus, I also read a comic book story called "The Medallion" from The Twilight Zone #57, July 1974. There is more than a passing resemblance between the two tales. Both are set in Philadelphia and both involve an artifact from the estate of a deceased man that allows the owner to travel through time. Both artifacts were also previously owned by statesmen of Florence.

In The Heads of Cerberus, the people of the future don't have names but are numbered instead, just as in We, The Prisoner, THX-1138, and Logan's Run.

Also, as in those four works, the people of the future Philadelphia know nothing of the outside world. Their world is a city. We of course recognize that ignorance among the populace is essential for the proper functioning of a statist regime. Today you can see that in North Korea, Iran, and certain political parties here in the United States.

The government of the future Philadelphia--oppressive, arbitrary, dictatorial--describes itself to its underclasses as "this blessed and democratic institution, the bulwark of your liberties!" (p. 129) Times have not changed: politicians still tell the same lies.

The other hero, Robert Drayton, explains the historical events leading up to the current state of affairs: "After the close of the World Wars . . . . communism had its way of Europe. Class war, which spells chaos, ensued." (p. 153) This was written in 1918 mind you.

Another character, a servant of the state, suggests that the current order is based on complete stasis and describes "the City of Philadelphia as having reached a state of perfection." (p. 115). Just this week, I spoke to a Venezuelan lawyer and a refugee from her own country. She warned me never to vote for a socialist. (Don't worry, I thought.) She went on to say that socialists want to make everything perfect, but it's never perfect. (I know that, too, but it's good to know I'm not the only one who knows it.)

Finally, Robert Drayton wonders: "Had the backbone of this people been entirely softened in the vinegar of even two centuries of oppression? And these were his own people, or their descendants--his fellow Americans! That hurt." (p. 119) Yeah, it hurts. What hurts more is that it has taken only half that time to get to a spineless and fearful American people, ripe to impose tyranny upon itself.

"Avalon" was a four-part serial published in Argosy from August 16 to September 6, 1919, concurrent with the publication of "The Heads of Cerberus" in The Thrill Book (Aug. 15-Oct. 15, 1919). According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, "Avalon" has never been reprinted. In his introduction to The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy, Gary Hoppenstand called it "undeniably Steven's weakest novel." (p. xv) If that's the case, it's no wonder that "Avalon" has not been reprinted. On the other hand, if Francis Stevens was "the most gifted woman writer of science fiction and science-fantasy between Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and C.L. Moore," as Sam Moskowitz claimed, or if she was "the woman who invented dark fantasy," as Dr. Hoppenstand claimed, shouldn't all of her known works be in print? Everything H.P. Lovecraft ever wrote practically down to his shopping lists ("beans") has been reprinted. How about a little ink for his supposed female counterpart?

Anyway, I have not read "Avalon," but judging from a blog entry by James Reasoner (1), the story is a melodrama, part adventure, part thriller, part fantasy, and part gothic romance. (There is even a old manor called Cliff House.) I suspect that Francis Stevens' themes of love over hatred and spirit over science are in the book. And I'm pretty sure it was not a work of dark fantasy. (Lloyd Arthur Eshbach did not consider it to be a fantasy at all.) Here's hoping that "Avalon" is reprinted sometime soon.

Notes

(1) "Avalon-Francis Stevens" on Mr. Reasoner's blog Rough Edges, May 11, 2008.

I'm not the first blogger to write about Francis Stevens. A writer (who seems to be unnamed) on the blog Skulls in the Stars wrote about her as well, several years ago. You can see his blog entry by clicking here. The blogger makes some comparisons between the stories of Francis Stevens and other works, such as stories by H.P. Lovecraft and A. Merritt and the television show Lost. He also posits that Stevens was "a 'transitional' author between the 'lawful universe' authors that came before her and the 'nihilistic universe' authors such as Lovecraft which found inspiration in her work." That may be true and a useful insight. I would differ with him however that the stories of Francis Stevens "present a truly dark vision of the world." That's not the case at all, for Francis Stevens--Gertrude Barrows Bennett--did not have a dark view of the world or humanity or our place in the universe, at least not one that showed in her work. I'll quote again from Skulls in the Stars:

Stevens often seems to feel that the audience needs to be let "off the hook" by the end of stories [sic], with some sort of deus ex machina intended to allow the reader to breathe a sigh of relief. To a modern reader, the sigh is usually more a sigh of disappointment, but Stevens is “transitional” in that she usually does not let the reader entirely off the hook: the horror is ratcheted back, but never completely to zero. [Emphasis added.]

I don't really consider the resolution to Stevens stories to be an act of deus ex machina, nor do I detect any desire to let her readers "off the hook." It's clear to me that Gertrude planned her stories very carefully. They are in no way slipshod. The endings are as she planned them to be. (She is said to have shut herself into a room, free of distraction, while she wrote and to labor away for months on each of her novels.) The Citadel of Fear and "Unseen-Unfeared" are the two stories that I think are most horrific (to date), yet both end in very life-affirming and positive ways. The very last event in The Citadel of Fear is literally uplifting.

Those things are beside the point. You will notice the words in bold above. There's the point. My contention is that dark fantasy is a sub-sub-genre of our own time, and because of that, neither Francis Stevens nor any of her contemporaries could have invented it. Dark fantasy suits the readers of today precisely because it is dark. The unnamed blogger on The Skull in the Stars is onto something, seemingly without knowing it, for the modern reader is disappointed with happy endings and seemingly with any affirmation of life, love, or humanity. Why? Good question. It may be that the modern reader is a child of a decadent society, one that--having thrown off its moorings to the past, to family, nation, and God himself--loathes itself and wishes to see itself destroyed. In other words, the modern reader is a desperately unhappy person and wishes to read what will affirm his very dark view of the world. In 1918, Francis Stevens and everybody else in the whole crazy world had reason to believe that this was the end. But rather than plunge into darkness, she and many of them turned towards the light. Why can't we do the same?

You know we're in trouble when you can't tell the difference between a real headline and something you would read in The Onion. Here's an example:

How can our future Mars colonies be free of sexism and racism?

So is this from The Onion? Or from The Guardian, "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize 2014"? If you think that there are still some things too ridiculous for people to believe, you probably failed this quiz. Yes, it's a real headline and a real story in The Guardian. I won't go into it. You can be transported into another realm by clicking here.

The writer of the article, Martin Robbins, sounds like the marketing girl from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams:

"And the wheel," said the Captain, "what about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."

"Ah," said the marketing girl, "well, we're having a little difficulty there."

"Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"

The marketing girl soured him with a look.

"All right, Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "you're so clever, you tell us what color it should be."

So the most important question involving the colonization of Mars is not how to get there or how people will survive there but how to make it a proper exercise in diversity. Those poor, benighted astronauts. They have hopelessly outdated ideas of what constitutes a safe place, you know, a place where you're not being pelted by cosmic rays or micrometeoroids, or scalded or frozen, or strangled or your blood boiled by an inhospitable atmosphere. No, a safe place is where your little feelings are protected from an oppressive overclass of fellow colonists.

The question is moot of course. It takes a vigorous and self-confident people to go into outer space. We are not that people. Or at least most of us aren't. Further, people like Mr. Robbins are too distracted by political considerations to accomplish anything as complex as establishing a colony on Mars, as he demonstrates in his article. They are Douglas Adams' marketing girl, more interested in the color (and sex) of the colony's people than its functionality. (I don't know about you, but I would not want to go to Mars with anyone other than a crew chosen only for their individual merits.) Further still, they are not especially interested in space exploration. Why should we turn outward when we can stay here and more closely examine our own navels? Why spend money out there when there are so many horrible, gaping problems here into which we can throw it like an out-of-control spacecraft hurtling into a black hole? If science fiction is dying, this is why.

My real point in writing today is this: In his article, Mr. Robbins refers to what he calls "the most pernicious space myth in existence . . . .

You can sum it up like this: "When we go into space, we will all magically become nice."

I agree with him that there is such a myth. It's one of the reasons why I never liked Star Trek: The Next Generation, for it seemed that the people in that show were scrubbed of their humanity, that in the future everyone would be nice to the point of blandness. But Mr. Robbins, evidently leftist in his orientation, is, like his fellow travelers, apparently lacking in irony or self-reflection. All you have to do is to take the Spacist (my new word) myth:

"When we go into space, we will all magically become nice."

Reduce it:

"When we __________, we will all magically become nice."

Then replace it with any number of progressive, leftist, or statist clichés:

"When we destroy the past and progress into the glorious future, we will all magically become nice."

"When we create a perfect society, we will all magically become nice."

"When we eliminate religion, we will all magically become nice."

"When we are all made equal by an equality enforced by limitless government, we will all magically become nice."

"When we band together as a homogenized mass of humanity ruled over by an all-powerful state with all things separating the individual from the state removed, we will all magically become nice."

See how easy that is? If the first statement is a myth, why would not all other statements taking that form be myths? If you think I'm exaggerating, here are Mr. Robbins' exact words:

It’s early days, but if we really want to create a progressive new world then issues like these should be at the hearts of our efforts from the very start.

No, this really isn't The Onion. (At least I don't think it is). This is a real person completely oblivious to human history and human nature. His words remind me of the mission assigned to the spaceship Integral in We by Yevgeny Zamyatin:

You will subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in the primitive condition of freedom, to the beneficent yoke of reason.

Time will tell if we choose the yoke or not--if we throw off the yoke or not.

"Claimed!", a three-part serial by Francis Stevens, first appeared in Argosy from March 6 to March 20, 1920, and was reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries in April 1941 and in the Canadian title Super Science Stories in October 1944. It has the distinction of being Stevens' only story (I believe) to be reprinted in hardback during the science fiction and fantasy revival of the 1960s. (1) The frequent reprintings are justified I think, for "Claimed!" is a good story with flashes of great color and imagination. One of the characters in the story calls its events "an uncanny mystery." It is that for sure. "Claimed!" is also Francis Stevens' darkest story to date. Don't worry, though: in the end the hero still claims his reward, a woman with hair white like moonlight.

"Claimed!" is the story of a small green casket made of indestructible stone and incised in scarlet with an indecipherable inscription. (That's a lot of ins.) The casket makes its way from an island thrust up in an earthquake from the seafloor, into the hands of a sailor, from there to a dealer in curios, and finally into the very powerful clutches of a New Jersey millionaire named Jesse J. Robinson. Strange and terrifying occurrences fall upon those in possession of the casket. Despite that, Robinson won't let go of it. His desires are simple: "I aim to keep the box," he says, "'cause I bought it and it's mine."

Jesse Robinson enlists the aid of his niece, Leilah, and a physician, Dr. John Vanaman. They stick by him throughout the ordeal, Leilah out of family loyalty, Vanaman because he is a man and because of his attraction to Leilah. The events of the story take place mostly in Robinson's home, but the climax comes in a thrilling chase scene in the Delaware River and at sea. "Claimed!" culminates in a phantasmagoric vision of the prehistoric past and Leilah's recounting of the very scary events on board the pursued ship. (She has been abducted as women in thrillers so often are. Vanaman must go to the rescue as men in thrillers so often do.) The title does triple duty. Robinson and his nemesis claim the green box. In the end, it is Vanaman who does the claiming of a different treasure.

Francis Stevens seems to have had a hard time getting started on her story. "Claimed!" has four beginnings, and she threw them all into the mix. After that the story calms down and runs pretty well straight to the end. The style is a little old-fashioned, and I would not consider it a tightly written story. As before, Stevens spent a lot of time writing about things that are without consequence. It takes, for instance, a whole chapter just for Robinson and his entourage to secure passage on and board a ship. On the other hand, she handled many images and scenes with great skill, and her writing and sensibility are very modern in places.

Stevens' handling of weird and terrifying events in her story is extraordinary, like scenes taken verbatim from dreams and nightmares. An upthrust island enshrouded by a foot-thick mat of floating ash and scoria. An indestructible green casket whose writing always sinks to the bottom, no matter which side is placed up. Ten scarlet cities sunk in the silent ocean. A fearsome scarlet archangel. White horses, their throats red with blood, charging into the sea. A ghostly, green tide creeping into a room high above sea level. An unknown figure of great power, speaking, in the pitch-black cabin of a rotting Atlantean trireme, of matters that are at once ancient and eternal. Despite its flaws, "Claimed!" is a good story. Lloyd Arthur Eshbach called it one of his "boyhood favorites." Augustus T. Swift, a reader of Providence, Rhode Island (and whose name some people thought was a pseudonym for H.P. Lovecraft), felt that it placed Francis Stevens in "the highest grade" of Argosy's writers. If you read it, you won't soon forget it.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) "Claimed!" is available online at Project Gutenberg Australia at the following URL:

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602981.txt

Argosy, March 6, 1920, with a cover story by Francis Stevens and very fine cover art by an unknown illustrator. Gertrude Barrows wrote thirteen published stories. Most of them were at one time or other a magazine cover story.

If you want to trace the origins of dark fantasy back to the early days of genre fiction, I'm not sure why you would stop at Francis Stevens and say, "Here it began.""Claimed!" is evidence that fantasy dark in mood and philosophy preceded her work, for I can see the roots of her story in The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers (1895), The Boats of the Glen Carig (1907) by William Hope Hodgson, and to a lesser extent The Night Land (1912), also by Hodgson. From The King in Yellow comes the artifact that by being possessed drives a person into despair or insanity. The Boats of the Glen Carig, like "Claimed!", opens with the log of a ship at sea and the approach to a strange and desolate island. Like Poe, too, Francis Stevens used epigrams (from Psalms and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner") to open her chapters.

Francis Stevens was an imaginative writer (though not outstanding in style or ability), and she was an innovator in some ways, but I think she worked more or less within the conventions of her field or by logical extension to what had gone before. I doubt that the influences I have mentioned here are direct. She probably read Chambers and Hodgson, probably also H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling, and very certainly Edgar Allan Poe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Fans and critics look for influences of course. Everyone wants to discover the secret history of a story or book, or the facts in a writer's life, just as they wish to discover the secret history of the world and humanity. There are those who believe Francis Stevens was an influence upon A. Merritt and H.P. Lovecraft. That has become an ineradicable meme on the Internet, reproducing like the most virulent of pathogens. There isn't any forthcoming evidence that she was such an influence. But because someone said it somewhere at sometime, and it has been repeated endlessly on the Internet, it must be true. "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft has some similarities with "Claimed!"--the upthrust and desolate island with its slimy, dripping ruins; the awakened and vengeful god; the dream-states of its characters and the lingering images from those dreamstates; the resulting madness among some of them; the unearthly prehistoric artifact; the climax at sea; also the uncanny mystery and even the use of log entries, newspaper articles, and letters in the story. (1) If you're looking for forerunners to "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926, 1928), you might consider "Claimed!". But was one an influence upon the other? Did Francis Stevens influence A. Merritt and H.P. Lovecraft? If your answer is "Yes," then please make your case, and don't let it be "Because I saw it on the Internet."

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) The use of clippings, letters, diaries, etc., was elsewhere in the literature of the time, in the U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos (1930, 1932, 1936) and Show Girl by J.P. McEvoy (1929) for instance.

Famous Fantastic Mysteries, February 1941. Note the white horses as in the original cover for Argosy. The cover artist was the great Virgil Finlay.

Super Science Stories, a Canadian edition from October 1944 with cover art by Leo Morey. Don't let the blurb fool you, there are no cavemen, cavewomen, or black panthers in "Claimed!".

Dark Fantasy and Francis Stevens-Part Three

The Stories of Francis Stevens-The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar

The Stories of Francis Stevens-The Nightmare

The Stories of Francis Stevens-The Labyrinth

The Stories of Francis Stevens-Friend Island

The Stories of Francis Stevens-The Citadel of Fear-Part One

The Stories of Francis Stevens-The Citadel of Fear-Part Two

The Stories of Francis Stevens-The Citadel of Fear-Part Three

The Stories of Francis Stevens-Behind the Curtain

The Stories of Francis Stevens-Unseen--Unfeared

Worlds Invisible

Franz Nabl and the Austrian P.E.N. Club

The Stories of Francis Stevens-The Elf Trap

The Stories of Francis Stevens-The Heads of Cerberus-Part One

The Stories of Francis Stevens-The Heads of Cerberus-Part Two

The Stories of Francis Stevens-Avalon

Francis Stevens at The Skulls in the Stars

Will Mars Be A Perfect World?

The Stories of Francis Stevens-Claimed!-Part One

The Stories of Francis Stevens-Claimed!-Part Two