The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories by Francis Stevens

(MIT Press, 2024)

Reviewed by Andy Sawyer

This “Radium Age” collection, edited by Lisa Yazek, features an intriguing novel and a number of short stories by Francis Stevens (Gertrude Mabel Barrows Bennett), “the woman who invented dark fantasy.” The 1919 novel, The Heads of Cerberus is, as Yazek notes, more than dark fantasy. Its multi-generic approach sheds an interesting light on fiction in the early 20th century, when the specialist magazines had yet to crystallise and you were never sure what sort of story you were reading.

It begins with a contemporary crime flavour (someone breaking into a house discovers it’s his old friend’s), adds a touch of fantasy (a mysterious powder secreted in a statue seems to have magic powers), and turns into an ingenious dystopian SF novel as our characters are flung into a future Philadelphia. There’s a touch of Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) in the way this future is extrapolated from Stevens’ present, but the explanation of what the powder is and what might actually be the relationship of 2118 Philadelphia to that present returns to something which might be outright fantasy or a premonition of the many-worlds theory. Stevens may be having her generic cake and eating it here, but she devours it with gusto. So should the reader. While the stage-Irish muscular giant, Trenmore, embodies the cliché inherent in genre, there’s a moment of heartbreak for one of the minor characters as explanations are wound up that can easily be overlooked.

The novel comes with a number of short stories showing Stevens’s creative approach to genre. “The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar” begins with a scene perhaps more jarring now than in 1904—this was the then 17 year old Stevens’ first story. Our narrator awakens with an ‘Oriental’ dwarf looking down at him. This mysterious “Lawrence” has, apparently, run over him in his car and taken him in to care for him. Dunbar enters a room with massive machinery. Some sort of experiment is going wrong but somehow he manages to stop a revolving flywheel and save a man from falling into a vat of acid. The ‘somehow’ is because during the incident a small cylinder of “stellarite”, a new element, absorbs the power of the machinery into his body, giving him super-strength. And that really is it—the story ends as abruptly as if we had lost the career of Peter Parker after the bite by the radioactive spider.

The matriarchal future of “Friend Island” appears feminist, but echoes those “topsy-turvy” satires by male writers mocking rather than embracing feminism. The hard-drinking sea-woman who narrates a story to a ‘mere male’ drinks tea rather than rum, tells her tale over her fourteenth macaroon, and the moral of the story is don’t swear in front of a (female) floating island. In contrast, “Behind the Curtain” evokes the early 20th-century Egyptology craze. Does the narrator value his sarcophagus containing the Princess Ta-Nezem more than his beautiful wife Beatrice? “Unseen-Unfeared” is described as “proto-Lovecraftian”, and indeed the revelation that among us lurk unseen tentacled monstrosities which reflect “the depravity of the human race” shows Stevens approaching Lovecraft territory although questioning it. “The Elf-Trap” seems to contain echoes of Dunsany, for the settlement which may be a somewhat squalid artists’ colony or possibly an Elven glamour is named ‘Carcassonne’. Once more, a narrative—of Professor Tademus, seduced by the lovely Elva—is contradicted or rendered ambiguous. It’s this ambiguity, or perhaps knowing undercutting of simple reader-expectations, which makes “Francis Stevens” a writer of more than antiquarian interest.

Review from BSFA Review 25 - Download your copy here.