Showing results by author "Gertrude Barrows Bennett" in All Categories

Gertrude Barrows Bennet is better known by her pen-name, Francis Stevens. With a career that only spanned three years between 1917 and 1920, when she stopped writing after her mother's death, she is credited as "the woman who invented dark fantasy". She was a direct influence on H.P. Lovecraft, and in the words of Sam Moskowitz was the "greatest woman writer of science fiction in the period between Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and C.L. Moore"

This book, set in a dystopian Philadelphia in 2118, invented a new, creepier kind of dystopian Sci Fi.

Clayton Barbour, the narrator, is a protected bourgeois son just weak enough to allow himself to be overwhelmed by a sly, dissembling force of evil, just strong enough to be constantly tormented by his weakness. Invited to a séance by a casual acquaintance, Moore, who sees in him a psychic force, he becomes the inadvertent victim of Moore's wife's contact with a channeled malignant force.

Nightmare was the first in a type of fiction that became known as dark fantasy, and remains a high water mark in the genre. First published in 1916, this debut novel began the three year career in which Francis Stevens became the person that launched entire genres of modern fictions. With her vast imagination and flair for the unusual and exciting, Gertrude Barrows Bennett created a seed that has grown into thousands of great works.

Listen to Citadel Of Fear with a movie-style soundtrack and amplify your audiobook experience. Citadel of Fear is considered Francis Stevens' masterpiece, by Lovecraft's acclaim. Two adventurers discover a lost city in the Mexican jungle. One is taken over by an evil god while the other falls in love with a woman from the ancient Mexican city of Tlapallan. Citadel of Fear was first published as a serial in Argosy Magazine in 1918-1919. It was eventually republished as a novel in 1970. It is now considered a "lost classic".