Francis Stevens, "The Nightmare"

Francis Stevens was the pen name of Gertrude Barrows Bennett -- a figure of some mystery who wrote for the pulps from 1917 to 1923 while caring for her sick mother and then, after her mother died, stopped writing and more or less disappeared from the face of the earth, even losing contact with her own daughter. Her weird fiction, largely published in the Munsey magazines (she was another discovery of Bob Davis'), was an influence on both A. Merritt and H.P. Lovecraft. She wrote a number of novels that have been reprinted now and again over the years, and in 2004 University of Nebraska Press under its Bison Books imprint published a collection of shorter works called The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy.

So far I've only read "The Nightmare", which is an odd story. It's a lost world story, in some ways reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land that Time Forgot (1918). A young American gentleman of leisure boards the Lusitania in New York en route to London, and wakes up in the middle of the ocean. He washes up on an island and soon finds out that he is somehow in the Pacific, not the Atlantic. He is soon embroiled in a contest between twin Russian brothers who have come to the island to seek an element in the interior that can change lead to gold. A shifty American guide (for whom the narrator is initially mistaken) is the only one who knows how to find his way through the volcanic cliffs into the interior. The lost world inside the volcano turns out to be full of bizarre creatures such as man-eating cabbages and giant bats.

This is basically an adventure story, but it manages to approach its material in an unusual way. For example, the protagonist is a bit of a bumbling twit, by no means a Burroughsian hero. He does perform some heroic actions despite himsef and through sheer luck, but for the most part he is tossed back and forth between the two rival gangs without much control over his own fate. Also interesting is how his sense of who his allies are shifts almost every time he moves from one group to the other. The story has a certain dream logic in that way, with the narrative shifting its valence as his context changes. There's a fairly large cast of characters for a novelette, and they are all distinct. The two Russian brothers are very charismatic and have a fascinating relationship -- a very powerful bond despite their violently conflicting aims (one a loyal tsarist, the other a nihilist). There's a young woman whose affections are torn between the two, yet whose character does not seem at all subsumed in them. She has her own mysterious reasons and goals.

What's most bizarre about this story is that it builds up a full head of steam, plunging us into the nightmare world of the mysterious island and the hugger-mugger and derring-do and scheming of the two gangs as they try to get the upper hand on each other, and then right at the climax of the action, the protagonist is plunged into the sea again and ... everything turns out to be a dream. WTF?!!!! She didn't really just do that, did she? Complete deflation of what had been an excellent adventure, in the most banal way possible. You have *got* to be kidding me! And then ... and *then* ... another switch is flipped, and it turns out it really *wasn't* a dream, except that everything we saw earlier has now either been disposed of or wasn't what it seemed at the time. So still sort of not real, but with future adventures in a similar vein apparently possible and imminent.

I'm not sure what happened. It almost seems as though Stevens got to a point where she couldn't resolve the story as she had set it up, so she just switched gears and gave up on it. On the other hand, apparently the shtick at All-Story at the time (1917) was stories that appeared to be supernatural or weird but ended up having a rational or common sense explanation, so it's possible that this was the normal structure for such stories. It seems completely self-defeating, in a way, although the way Stevens shifts gears twice at the end is very unusual, so maybe she was playing with the formula she had been handed.

So the verdict is out on whether she wasn't in control of her material or was actually playing an interesting game with it. We'll see if the other stories shed any light on the question. What's clearer is that she had a very good grasp of character and weird adventure. I found "The Nightmare" completely vivid and engrossing up to the point at which the rug was pulled out from under the narrative. A real page turner.

QOTD

For many days after this incident, the young man avoided the window that looked into Doctor Rappaccini's garden, as if something ugly and monstrous would have blasted his eye-sight, had he been betrayed into a glance. He felt conscious of having put himself, to a certain extent, within the influence of an unintelligible power, by the communication which he had opened with Beatrice. The wisest course would have been, if his heart were in any real danger, to quit his lodgings and Padua itself, at once; the next wiser, to have accustomed himself, as far as possible, to the familiar and day-light view of Beatrice; thus bringing her rigidly and systematically within the limits of ordinary experience. Least of all, while avoiding her sight, should Giovanni have remained so near this extraordinary being, that the proximity and possibility even of intercourse, should give a kind of substance and reality to the wild vagaries which his imagination ran riot continually in producing. Guasconti had not a deep heart--or at all events, its depths were not sounded now--but he had a quick fancy, and an ardent southern temperament, which rose every instant to a higher fever-pitch. Whether or no Beatrice possessed those terrible attributes--that fatal breath--the affinity with those so beautiful and deadly flowers--which were indicated by what Giovanni had witnessed, she had at least instilled a fierce and subtle poison into his system. It was not love, although her rich beauty was a madness to him; nor horror, even while he fancied her spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that seemed to pervade her physical frame; but a wild offspring of both love and horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered like the other.
-- Nathaniel Hawathorne, "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844)

Image of the Day

Paprika (2006)

"Don't you think dreams and the internet are similar? They are both areas where the repressed conscious mind vents."