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.

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Review from BSFA Review 25 - Download your copy here.