randy_byers | Entries tagged with francis stevens

Claimed is a fantasy novel with elements of horror. It opens with a ship discovering a volcanic island recently thrust up from the ocean and bearing what appears to be ruins of an ancient city. One of the crew finds a green oblong box and takes it with him. We next see him sell the object to a dealer in ancient artifacts in San Francisco. We switch once more in this fitful beginning to an old millionaire who has acquired the object and has some kind of seizure in the middle of the night. A young doctor is called in to tend to him, and an element of romance is introduced into the mystery when he immediately falls for the old man's beautiful silver-haired niece. The old man hires the doctor as a kind of guard, and bizarre events begin to unfold as the doctor gradually becomes aware that there's something unnatural about that oblong box.

This novel isn't quite as compelling as Stevens' Citadel of Fear or The Heads of Cerberus, but it still has a number of things to recommend it. Chief amongst these is the eerie, foreboding atmosphere she's able to conjure at times and the full bore explosion of fantastic imagery in the finale, which many people have pointed out bears some resemblance to H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu," published six years later. The other strength is the character of the old man, who is a successful capitalist who is notable for his fierce possessiveness -- which is depicted as a source of both strength and weakness and really gives the story its shape, leaving the protagonist doctor seeming a bit secondary despite his acts of heroism.

If Stevens has a failing as a writer, it's a lack of so-called narrative drive. All of her longer works suffer from too many scenes in which the characters sit around interpreting what has just happened, rather than doing something. Claimed suffers from this narrative passivity more than her best stories, and the insipid romance that she often manages to keep in the background is too much in the forefront in this one. Or maybe it's just that the doctor is such an uninteresting characters compared to the brash Irishmen of Citadel and Cerberus. The niece is practically a non-entity, so she also pales in comparison to the female protagonists of those two books.

This is not the kind of lost world adventure that was something of a specialty of Stevens', but more of a metaphysical fantasy along the lines of her novel Possessed: A Tale of the Demon Serapion, which was also serialized in 1920. On that front the novel succeeds in creating an otherworldly feeling, particularly in the climax, but also in a fine scene involving the doctor's aunt, who arrives on the scene as a blithe spiritualist whom he shamefacedly (as a man of science) asks for help. Indeed, it's really only the doctor and niece who are weak characters, since many of the secondary characters come off better. Stevens' descriptive powers as just as strong as always, and here she does a good job of characterizing the sea, which has a central role in the story. She also does a good job of evoking the foggy atmosphere of San Francisco, which makes me a little curious whether she had visited before she moved there after she stopped writing. Well, she could just as easily have picked it up from reading other adventure stories.

I believe I've now read everything that Stevens published except her first short story, which came out when she was 17, and the novel Avalon, which has never been reprinted perhaps because it has no elements of fantasy and is thus of little interest to the readers who have kept her name alive. She only wrote for a short period, so her body of work is not large. I'm still not sure what to make of the claims that she was influential on the developing genres of dark fantasy and science fiction, because I simply haven't read widely enough in that era to have much sense of what was common and what was new, but she is certainly a writer worth paying attention to. She's not doing too badly for a forgotten writer, since she's had a pretty good history of being reprinted. I highly recommend her to anyone interested in the pulp era of the fantastic.

[Magazine cover scan from isfdb.org.]

After reading The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy, I was left with the impression that Francis Stevens (pen name for Gertrude Barrows Bennett) was a kind of outsider artist who used genre tropes in eccentric ways, perhaps due to her inexperience as a writer, and wasn't always in complete control of her material. Now having read the two novels she is perhaps most famous for, I've revised my impression. Theses are both supremely accomplished pulp novels in which she exhibits full control of the tropes and material. If they are somewhat eccentric, it's in the way that she blends genres, although it's important to bear in mind that she was writing at a time (her stories were published between 1917 and 1923) when the pulp magazines were only on the verge of specializing into specific genres of the fantastic such as horror and science fiction. But in terms of the skills of the writer, these novels seem superior to me than anything written by Homer Eon Flint, for example. Her imagination is similarly outrageous, too, although it runs more toward the occult and the weird than Flint's did.

Stevens Citadel of Fear Argosy.jpg

Citadel of Fear was serialized in The Argosy magazine in September and October 1917. (I read the 1984 paperback from Caroll & Graf.) It's a remarkable novel that starts out as a lost world story set in Mexico. Two American gold miners -- one a big bull of an Irishman, who is the protagonist, and the other a clever sneak, who is the antagonist -- are lost in the Mexican desert when they stumble upon a mysterious hacienda. Soon they are taken to an underground city inhabited by pre-Toltec giants. A conflict amongst this strange race results in our hero being expelled from the hidden city. The action then moves forward fifteen years, when our hero visits his sister in the suburbs of a large city in the Eastern US. Soon the household is under attack from bizarre and mysterious creatures, and the main suspect is a sinister man who lives in a walled compound and claims to be breeding livestock. What he's really up to is much more outlandish than that, of course, and the novel climaxes in a supernatural conflict.

Citadel of Fear is very conventional in many ways, with a manly man as the hero and an early form of the manic pixie dream girl as his love interest. The lost world section of the story is fascinating for the way it creates its exotic pre-Columbian fantasy world, in which ancient Mexican gods vie for power. The action bogs down a bit in the middle part of book, as perhaps too much futile coming-and-going and vague bumpings in the night and comical-skeptical detectives prolong the slow reveal of what then becomes a wonderfully grotesque premise leading to the finale. As others have commented, if the early parts bear the imprint of H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, there's more than a little bit of H.G. Wells' Island of Dr Moreau in the latter part of the book, although this is more science fantasy than science fiction when push comes to shove. It's here that Stevens' grotesque imagination is set free, and there is a nightmare quality to the climax that still carries quite a charge. It's also fascinating how Stevens retains a conflicted, mixed perspective of skepticism, Christianity, and paganism in the denouement, with a slight emphasis on the latter that seems a hallmark of the fantasy genre.

The Heads of Cerberus was serialized in The Thrill Book magazine in August through October 1919. (I read the 1952 hardback collectors edition from Polaris Press.) The Thrill Book was a short-lived attempt to publish a magazine specializing in the fantastic, and Stevens apparently sold them other stories that were lost when the magazine quickly folded. This novel begins in contemporary Philadelphia when another big bull of an Irish-American finds his friend blacked out from a blow to the head in an upstairs bedroom. Soon we learn about an ancient crystal vial with a Cerberus-headed stopper and supposedly containing dust of magical properties. When the dust is poured out, the two men and the Irishman's sister (where have we seen that before?) are transported first to a weird twilight fantasyland and then to a dystopian Philadelphia of two centuries in the future. Satirical and yet cracking adventures ensue, with a wonderfully unsettled resolution in which the transformative dust disappears with a gentleman of uncertain intentions.

Stevens Head of Cerberus Thrill Book.jpg

Stevens Head of Cerberus Thrill Book.jpg

The Heads of Cerberus is touted as possibly the first alternate world story. What's interesting to me about that aspect of the story is that the alternate Philadelphia ends up being specifically a kind of imaginary world even within the story itself. It isn't so much a parallel world as one that is conjured up by the imaginations of the protagonists, and thus it becomes a kind of metaphor for science fiction itself: a work of the imagination. I also found it interesting that the rationalization for how this other world was created/reached was very reminiscent of the rationalization for the parallel world in The Blind Spot by Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint, which was serialized in Argosy All-Story in 1921. Hall is usually credited for the occult aspects of that hybrid novel, and it must be said that Stevens handles the occult aspects of her novel much more competently than Hall does. Still, both novels have occult and science fictional aspects, and I'm not enough of a scholar of the era to surmise whether it's a matter of influence or of common practice in the pulps in those days.

A lot of claims are made for Stevens' influence on the developing genres of the fantastic. It appears that the admiring quote about Citadel of Fear that's still widely attributed to H.P. Lovecraft was not in fact written by him. It was written by someone named August T. Swift, which was long wrongly thought to be a pseudonym of Lovecraft's. I haven't seen any indication that Lovecraft commented on Stevens at all, although people see signs of influence, and I can see why. As for the claim that A. Merritt admired her work, there is no direct evidence that I've seen. Apparently for many years people thought Stevens was a pseudonym of Merritt's, and this was only debunked in the '50s. Again, you can see the similarities in the works of Stevens and Merrit, but is that a sign of influence? Whatever the case, Stevens remained a name to be conjured with amongst the cognoscenti of the fantasy pulps, and the fact that her work has been reprinted over the years attests to a continuing admiration, even if this has never led to fame.

One of the best articles I've found about her is Andrew Liptak's Kirkus Review piece, "The Influential Pulp Career of Frances Stevens". Here I learned that Gertrude Barrows published her first story in 1904 at the age of 17, thus establishing that she was interested in writing at an early age. (Other pieces I've read indicated that she was more interested in drawing early on.) Another interesting tidbit is that when she picked up the pen again in 1917, the pen name she wanted to use was Jean Veil, but Munsey magazine editor Bob Davis stuck her with Francis Stevens for some reason. Maybe he thought "Veil" was too obvious, but I like its artificiality.

Both of these novels are available in etexts, but I've read that a lot of the e-versions of Citadel of Fear don't include the whole novel, so be sure to dig a bit before you download one. Last time I checked, neither novel was available at the Gutenberg Project, and I think I only found one work by Stevens there. Another sign, perhaps, that she is arill undervalued. Whether she was influential or not, her stories and novels strike me as more than worthy to be included in the roster of forgotten writers mentioned in the jacket copy of Polaris Press: "Some of these old masters of fantasy -- and there are many others -- were A. Merritt, Murray Leinster, Homer Eon Flint, Ray Cummings, Garrett P. Serviss, J.U. Giesy and Francis Stevens." For me she joins Serviss and Flint as previously unknown writers of early science fiction who are worth exploring in depth.

[NOTE: The scans of the magazine covers were taken from isfdb.org.]

I previously wrote about the first story in this collection, "The Nightmare," in February 2010, and it has taken me this long to get back to the rest of the stories. As I noted then, Francis Stevens was the pen name for Gertrude Barrows Bennett, who wrote a variety of fantasy stories for mostly the Munsey magazines from 1917 to 1923. Her work was admired by A. Merritt and H.P. Lovecraft, and several of her novels have been reprinted over the years. The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2004, and it appears to contain all of her short fiction, although "The Labyrinth" has apparently been published as a stand-alone novel in its own right.

Gary Hoppenstand, in his introduction to this edition, argues that Stevens was not only an influence on Merritt and Lovecraft but one of the inventors of the dark fantasy subgenre, which might be described as a merger of fantasy and horror. That may be the case, but these stories aren't all dark fantasies. Even the ones that are seem to come at it from an odd angle. For example, "The Labyrinth" starts out as a mystery about the disappearance of a young woman, who is the cousin of the narrator and the love interest of two other men. As in "The Nightmare," the protagonist is not a very heroic figure and basically bumbles his way into the titular labyrinth in the company of his cousin and her suitors. The labyrinth is full of strange devices and inexplicable designs which menace the lives of this variably intrepid crew, but ultimately it becomes merely a backdrop to the real matter of the story, which is the choice the young woman has to make between the two suitors. So instead of a metaphor for the mysteries of life and death, the labyrinth becomes a metaphor for the mystery of love. The story is most effective as an exploration of the challenges and convolutions of choosing a good partner, and it keeps you guessing until the end on that score.

"The Elf Trap" is likewise a romantic story with supernatural elements. "Friend Island" is the real oddball in the collection, set in a feminist future in which women are the dominant gender and one aviator-adventuress nearly finds paradise on a strange tropical island before a man spoils all the fun. It's really a remarkable story. "Sunfire" is more like "The Nightmare": a lost world adventure story set in a South American milieu, but while there's a monster in this one what's unusual about the approach is how much it plays like a comedy of errors, with once again a band of "heroes" who basically come across as a bunch of bumbling, egotistical, selfish idiots.

That said, a number of these stories do play the horror aspects fairly straight. "Behind the Curtain" is a revenge story that is very upfront about its debt to Poe, specifically "The Cask of Amontillado". "Unseen-Unfeared" is a macabre story about grotesque monsters invisible to the human eye. "Serapion" is another long story that is perhaps the most effective dark fantasy of the lot. The protagonist gets involved in a paranormal experiment that seems to summon a spirit of the dead that desires to possess him. I wondered in my review of Brackett and Bradbury's "Lorelei of the Red Mist" whether Brackett had borrowed the trope of the protagonist with a divided/conflicted consciousness from Merritt, and here we find it in Stevens, as the haunting spirit attempts to merge itself with the protagonist. This leads to a remarkable duel of wills that reaches a very strange and conflicted conclusion.

When I read "The Nightmare" five years ago I wasn't sure whether Stevens was in control of her material. Now I would say that her writing reflected a lack of experience and was almost a kind of outsider art. She had a vivid imagination, and there's something eccentric about the way she expresses it. I found the eccentricity compelling even when the stories were a bit clumsy or unfocused. Her approach comes across as unique, even in a standard form like the lost world adventure. If nothing else, her approach feels fresh because it doesn't use the standard heroic, alpha male tropes so beloved of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his imitators. That said, the casual racism in her work seems all too standard and familiar, even though it does seem casual rather than ideological. Less loathsome than that in, for example, George Allan England's Darkness and Dawn trilogy. And indeed, while I didn't find the stories in this collection quite up to the level of Merritt's The Moon Pool, I did find them superior to England for all that he's a more polished writer. I was inspired enough by Stevens' oddball imagination that I ordered a copy of her novel, Citadel of Fear. Sounds like one of Kuttner and Moore's science fantasies, doesn't it?

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.