Francis Stevens’ The Citadel of Fear: Early Weird Fantasy

Francis Stevens is the pen name of Gertrude Barrows Bennett. The Citadel of Fear  was her first and most famous novel, published in 1918. It features a “lost city” in Central America, along the lines of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. However, where the main threats in Doyle’s adventure were dinosaurs, Stevens’ tale features a lost civilization – the ancient city of Tlapallan – which is inhabited by peoples who still practice human sacrifice and worship the ancient Aztec gods.

Two prospectors for gold, the greedy and amoral Archer Kennedy, and our hero, the young Irishman Colin “Boots” O’Hara, stumble upon Tlapallan and are stunned to find an American, Svend Biornson, living on a plantation there and married to one of the natives. He keeps them in captivity until they can be returned to civilization, but of course they escape and cause all kinds of havoc. Along the way, Kennedy witnesses a gruesome ceremony where a hapless villager is sacrificed to the evil god, Nacoc-Yaotl, “the black maker of hatreds”. He ends up becoming possessed by the demon. O’Hara is recaptured and sent packing back across the desert.

At this point, the scene abruptly shifts to New England, where O’Hara is visiting his newly wed sister, Cliona, and her husband, Tony Rhodes. All of the trials and adventures Colin underwent in Tlapallan are like a fading dream to him (which is hard to believe, but it moves the story along). One evening, Colin and Tony go into town for business and leave Cliona alone for the night in their country bungalow. Late that night, something horrific breaks in and destroys all the furniture downstairs. Cliona hears the thing coming up the stairs to her bedroom, and it starts beating on the door. A huge white claw tears through the door, and she empties her pistol in the direction of the door. There follows some unearthly shrieking and the thing retreats downstairs and out of the house. When Cliona goes to investigate, she finds an enormous amount of blood that trails down to the stream in her backyard and disappears.

Cliona and Tony decide to leave the bungalow and move into a different house. Unbeknownst to them, Colin has bought the bungalow and plans to get to the bottom of the mystery. They think he is traveling in South America. One night, he is attacked by a strange ape-like animal and nearly strangled to death. Colin manages to break one of its arms, and it leads him on a wild chase through the countryside until it darts inside a large old estate house.

What follows is part mystery, part dark fantasy, as Colin doggedly uncovers a devious plot to subjugate North America to the evil will of Nacoc-Yaotl. Even though Stevens did not stay in school past the eighth grade, she has an excellent command of the English language and ancient Aztec mythology. Her plotting is somewhat disjointed, which I put down to the fact that the novel was originally serialized in The Argosy weekly magazine. I can imagine her editor telling her to get the main characters out of the very dark and weird city of Tlapallan and into more familiar surroundings!

I can also see how she might have influenced later fantasy writers like H. P. Lovecraft. Just check out this description of the lower level of the mysterious house Colin is exploring:

That dim expanse must be called swamp or marsh, because a better name has not been made to name it by. But Nature never made a marsh like that. Between the granite pillars, fungoids and some kind of whitish vegetation like pale rushes grew thickly, but though those fungoids and rushes had a strangeness of their own, it was not the vegetable growth alone which made Reed’s marsh peculiar.

Its entire space was acrawl with living forms that for repulsiveness could only be compared to a resurgence from their graves of creatures dead and half-decayed.

Colin saw them by a livid light that by no means increased their beauty — a light that was derived from the fungoids. These singular growths glowed with a whitish-gray effulgence that, diffused by curling vapors, gave the place such a dim illumination as might grace the surface of a witch’s caldron.

A cold, dank caldron it was, with fires pale and heatless as the moon, and giving off with its mist wraiths the effluvium of decay and of the life that springs from decay. Like some horrible, hidden ulcer, Reed’s work-room lay festering; and above it the black beams of the old house dripped and rotted with its moisture.

Francis Stevens. The Citadel of Fear (Kindle Locations 3156-3165). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

Anyway, there’s a huge climactic battle between good and evil, and it’s all a lot of fun. Colin O’Hara is a little too good to be true, and Kennedy is a little too nasty to be believable, but this was originally published in a pulp magazine. Fans of classic Lovecraft will definitely enjoy this one.

Charles Williams’ Descent Into Hell

Book number 60 of 2024

I’ve read five of Charles Williams’ eight novels, and while they are of uneven quality, they never fail to entertain and inspire interesting thoughts on philosophy and religion. Descent Into Hell, Williams’ sixth novel, was published in 1937. Just like his previous five books, things are really, really weird! It opens with a reading of playwright Peter Stanhope’s new play, A Pastoral. The village of Battle Hill is going to perform it, but everyone is confused about it:

To begin with, it had no title beyond A Pastoral. That was unsatisfactory. Then the plot was incredibly loose. It was of no particular time and no particular place, and to any cultured listener it seemed to have little bits of everything and everybody put in at odd moments.

CHARLES WILLIAMS. Descent into Hell (Kindle Locations 126-128). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

After the reading, Pauline Anstruther is walking back home, and she is terrified of meeting someone or something that has been manifesting itself to her her entire life: a doppelgänger, or “evil twin”. Just as she is about to reach the safety of her house, she sees it up ahead. She manages to get inside, but she is very shaken.

Meanwhile, Lawrence Wentworth is another eminent inhabitant of Battle Hill: a famous historian. He is an older man who fancies himself the sage of a group of younger villagers – Hugh Prescott, Adela Hunt, and Pauline, among others. He is very self-centered, but he has harbored a fancy that he and Adela might end up together one day. His complacency is destroyed when it becomes clear that Hugh also desires Adela, and he quickly supplants Wentworth in Adela’s affections.

But strange things are happening in Battle Hill. Years ago, a hopeless and outcast construction worker hanged himself from an upper floor joist of Wentworth’s home when it was being built. His shade continues to haunt the house, even though Wentworth is completely unaware of him. Pauline’s grandmother, Margaret, has a dream in which she sees two men looking out of a second floor window of Wentworth’s house. She is nearing the end of her life, and she increasingly sees how fragile the boundary is between our world and the world of the dead. Battle Hill itself seems to be a nexus where time and the barrier between this life and the afterlife is breaking down. People from the past exist alongside those living in the present.

An energy reposed in it, strong to affect all its people; an energy of separation and an energy of knowledge. If, as she believed, the spirit of a man at death saw truly what he was and had been, so that whether he desired it or not a lucid power of intelligence manifested all himself to him — then that energy of knowledge was especially urgent upon men and women here, though through all the world it must press upon the world. She felt, as if by a communication of a woe not hers, how the neighbourhood of the dead troubled the living; how the living were narrowed by the return of the dead.

Charles Williams. Descent into Hell (Kindle Locations 949-953). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

One evening, Wentworth is looking out his window, wishing desperately that Adela would come up his drive, when she does. However, when he goes out to meet her, he soon realizes that she’s not the “real” Adela, but rather the Adela he wishes her to be – an Adela who is not involved with Hugh, and who only desires what he wants for himself.

Meanwhile, Peter Stanhope asks Pauline what’s bothering her, and she reluctantly tells him of her dread of meeting herself on the street. There follows a beautiful conversation in which he takes her experience of meeting her doppelgänger seriously and offers to take her fear upon himself:

“Listen — when you go from here, when you’re alone, when you think you’ll be afraid, let me put myself in your place, and be afraid instead of you.” He sat up and leaned towards her. “It’s so easy,” he went on, “easy for both of us. It needs only the act. For what can be simpler than for you to think to yourself that since I am there to be troubled instead of you, therefore you needn’t be troubled? And what can be easier than for me to carry a little while a burden that isn’t mine?”

She said, still perplexed at a strange language: “But how can I cease to be troubled? Will it leave off coming because I pretend it wants you? Is it your resemblance that hurries up the street?”

“It is not,” he said, “and you shall not pretend at all. The thing itself you may one day meet – never mind that now, but you’ll be free from all distress because that you can pass on to me. Haven’t you heard it said that we ought to bear one another’s burdens?” “But that means — —” she began, and stopped.

“I know,” Stanhope said. “It means listening sympathetically, and thinking unselfishly, and being anxious about, and so on. Well, I don’t say a word against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think when Christ or St. Paul, or whoever said bear, or whatever he Aramaically said instead of bear, he meant something much more like carrying a parcel instead of someone else. To bear a burden is precisely to carry it instead of. If you’re still carrying yours, I’m not carrying it for you – however sympathetic I may be. And anyhow there’s no need to introduce Christ, unless you wish. It’s a fact of experience. If you give a weight to me, you can’t be carrying it yourself; all I’m asking you to do is to notice that blazing truth. It doesn’t sound very difficult.”

“And if I could,” she said. “If I could do — whatever it is you mean, would I? Would I push my burden on to anybody else?”

“Not if you insist on making a universe for yourself,” he answered.

Charles Williams. Descent into Hell (Kindle Locations 1372-1388). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

Pauline agrees to try to hand over her burden to Stanhope, and for the first time in years, while walking home, she enjoys the experience – seeing a kitten and petting it, marveling at some flowers, and just noticing the beauty of the sunset.

However, later that evening, an acquaintance of her grandmother, a Mrs. Sammiles, stops by and invites Pauline to walk with her. She promises to relieve Pauline of her anxiety, but in an opposite sense from what Stanhope offered:

“My dear, it’s so simple. If you will come with me, I can fill you, fill your body with any sense you choose. I can make you feel whatever you’d choose to be. I can give you certainty of joy for every moment of life. Secretly, secretly; no other soul — no other living soul.”

… And while her heart beat more quickly and her mind laboured at once to know and not to know its desires, a voice slid into her ear, teasing her, speeding her blood, provoking her purpose. It spoke of sights and sounds, touches and thrills, and of entire oblivion of harm; nothing was to be that she did not will, and everything that she willed, to the utmost fulness of her heart, should be. She would be enough for herself.

Charles Williams. Descent into Hell (Kindle Locations 1543 -1545, 1554 -1557). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

So, it looks like Pauline is to be fought over by two opposing spiritual forces – one that encourages the sharing of burdens, and one that promises all selfish desires can be fulfilled. As the novel progresses, Stanhope’s play gets performed, Wentworth slides further and further into his solipsism, and Pauline finds her true self in sharing others’ burdens.

Williams’ prose in Descent Into Hell is not easy – I found myself rereading passages a few times to make sure I was getting his meaning. His characters’ conversations are spare and allusive – they leave a lot unsaid. Hovering over everything are shades of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which is quoted directly several times, Dante’s The Divine Comedy and the Jewish myth of Adam and Lilith. Williams assumes his readers have a high level of education!

Here’s an example of how Williams tries to convey very abstract concepts in his prose:

She knew she had always spoken poetry against the silence of this world; now she knew it had to be spoken against — that perhaps, but also something greater, some silence of its own. She recognized the awful space of separating stillness which all mighty art creates about itself, or, uncreating, makes clear to mortal apprehension. Such art, out of “the mind’s abyss”, makes tolerable, at the first word or note or instructed glance, the preluding presence of the abyss. It creates in an instant its own past. Then its significance mingles with other significances; the stillness gives up kindred meanings, each in its own orb, till by the subtlest graduations they press into altogether other significances, and these again into others, and so into one contemporaneous nature, as in that gathering unity of time from which Lilith feverishly fled. But that nature is to us a darkness, a stillness, only felt by the reverberations of the single speech.

Charles Williams. Descent into Hell (Kindle Locations 2544-2550). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

Descent Into Hell  is an interesting study in the dangers of self-absorption and gratification. As Peter Stanhope and Pauline Anstruther demonstrate, we are created to share each other’s burdens, and it is through charity and love that we become fully human. It’s a difficult novel, but a rewarding one.

Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop

Book number 59 of 2024

The Haunted Bookshop is the sequel to Parnassus On Wheels, which I reviewed here. That book was the quirky and fun tale of a middle-aged farmwoman, Helen McGill, who left her farm and brother to sell books to other rural folk from a mobile, horse-drawn bookstore. The theme of the novel was that anyone can appreciate a good book, given the opportunity. Roger Mifflin was the eccentric little man who sold her the bookstore, named Parnassus.

Roger and Helen return in The Haunted Bookshop, happily married and running a bookshop called Parnassus at Home on Gissing Street, in Brooklyn. There is sign explaining why it’s haunted:

This shop is haunted by the ghosts
Of all great literature, in hosts;
We sell no fakes or trashes.
Lovers of books are welcome here,
No clerks will babble in your ear,
Please smoke— but don’t drop ashes!

Christopher Morley. The Haunted Bookshop (Kindle Locations 69-73). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

It is filled to the ceiling with used books, and Roger hosts meetings of fellow booksellers from all over New York City. One evening, a young ad salesman, Aubrey Gilbert, stops in to see if Roger would be interested in running ads for his store. Roger declines, but invites him to stay for dinner, since Helen is staying with family in Boston. They hit it off, and Aubrey mentions that one of his accounts is for Chapman’s Daintybits Prunes. George Chapman is also a book lover, who has asked Roger to give his daughter, Titania, a job in his bookshop so she can learn what real life is like. She has been to finishing school, so as a result knows nothing!

While Roger and Aubrey are having a leisurely meal, a customer comes in, asking for a copy of Carlyle’s Cromwell. Roger is sure he has a copy, but when he goes to where it should be, it isn’t there. A little later, while he is dusting the shelves, there is the copy of Cromwell, right where it should be! Meanwhile, Helen returns from Boston and Titania arrives. The Mifflins have fixed up the spare room for her, and she is delighted to begin a career “in literature”. Roger tells Helen about the case of the Cromwell, and when he goes to show her, it’s gone again! Titania picks up the New York Times, and in the Lost and Found section there is this ad:

Lost – Copy of Thomas Carlyle’s Oliver Cromwell between Gissing Street, Brooklyn, and the Octagon Hotel. If found before midnight, Tuesday, Dec. 3, return to assistant chef, Octagon Hotel.

That evening, Aubrey stops by to tell Roger about the ad and the fact that he dined at the Octagon with George Chapman. He also mentions that when he was in the elevator, a chef got in, carrying a copy of Cromwell! Aubrey also meets the beautiful Titania, with predictable results.

Thus begins an entertaining mystery involving a strange copy of Carlyle’s Cromwell, messages sent via Lost and Found notices, and other odd occurrences. Aubrey finds himself a target of a dastardly gang of German spies hellbent on blowing up President Woodrow Wilson as he travels to Europe to negotiate the peace. Meanwhile, Titania enjoys working at the Haunted Bookshop enormously, even if she is blissfully unaware of the danger she is in.

While the plot of The Haunted Bookshop is an improvement over that of Parnassus On Wheels, in The Haunted Bookshop Morley has an unfortunate tendency to use characters to expound his personal opinions to the reader. The Haunted Bookshop was published in 1919, immediately after the World War I Armistice, and Morley certainly had strong feelings about how that conflict occurred and how the peace should be concluded. That’s understandable, but to have Roger Mifflin pontificate for paragraph after paragraph gets tiresome. Morley even devotes an entire chapter to a letter Roger writes in which he expresses his admiration for books, booksellers, and President Wilson, and the role they will play in the new world that is certain to arise from the ashes of The Great War. I found myself wanting Morley to get back to the story at hand, because it was a pretty good one.

On balance, The Haunted Bookshop isn’t a profound work by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a fairly fun adventure tale. It’s too bad that whenever things start to get interesting, Morley chooses to veer off into opinionating. Parnassus On Wheels is the better novel, and you won’t be missing much if you skip this one.

Christopher Morley’s Parnassus On Wheels

Book number 58 of 2024

I was poking around the Standard Ebooks website looking for old mystery novels, and Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop came up. I had never heard of him, but I learned that The Haunted Bookshop  was actually the sequel to Parnassus On Wheels, so I decided to read that one first. I’m glad I did! Parnassus On Wheels (1917) is the comic tale of thirty-nine-year-old Helen McGill who decides to leave her and her brother’s farm in New England and become an itinerant bookseller.

Helen’s brother, Andrew, writes a bestselling book about the benefits of the simple country life, and he becomes so in-demand that Helen ends up doing most of the work on the farm. As Helen puts it:

But Andrew got to be less and less of a farmer and more and more of a literary man. He bought a typewriter. He would hang over the pigpen noting down adjectives for the sunset instead of mending the weathervane on the barn which took a slew so that the north wind came from the southwest. He hardly ever looked at the Sears Roebuck catalogues any more, and after Mr.   Decameron came to visit us and suggested that Andrew write a book of country poems, the man became simply unbearable.

Christopher Morley. Parnassus on Wheels (Kindle Locations 130-133). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

She has about reached the end of her patience when an eccentric little man pulls up to their farmhouse in a horse-driven van that is a combination mobile home/bookstore. Roger Mifflin has an almost religious zeal when it comes to providing good reads to the families who live in rural America, but he is ready to retire. He had planned on offering his operation to Andrew for $400, but Helen jumps at the opportunity to go on an adventure, and buys him out herself.

So Helen and Mifflin take to the road as he shows her the ropes of how to sell good books to farm families. He is very careful about how he goes about his work:

“I don’t pay much over fifty cents for books as a rule, because country folks are shy of paying much for them. They’ll pay a lot for a separator or a buggy top, but they’ve never been taught to worry about literature! But it’s surprising how excited they get about books if you sell ’em the right kind. Over beyond Port Vigor there’s a farmer who’s waiting for me to go back— I’ve been there three or four times— and he’ll buy about five dollars’ worth if I know him. First time I went there I sold him Treasure Island, and he’s talking about it yet. I sold him Robinson Crusoe, and Little Women for his daughter, and Huck Finn, and Grubb’s book about The Potato. Last time I was there he wanted some Shakespeare, but I wouldn’t give it to him. I didn’t think he was up to it yet.”

Christopher Morley. Parnassus on Wheels (Kindle Locations 394-401). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

Later on, Mifflin explains why he has spent so much time selling books to country folk:

“What I say is, who has ever gone out into high roads and hedges to bring literature home to the plain man? To bring it home to his business and bosom, as somebody says? The farther into the country you go, the fewer and worse books you find. I’ve spent several years joggling around with this citadel of crime, and by the bones of Ben Ezra I don’t think I ever found a really good book (except the Bible) at a farmhouse yet, unless I put it there myself. The mandarins of culture— what do they do to teach the common folk to read? It’s no good writing down lists of books for farmers and compiling five-foot shelves; you’ve got to go out and visit the people yourself— take the books to them, talk to the teachers and bully the editors of country newspapers and farm magazines and tell the children stories— and then little by little you begin to get good books circulating in the veins of the nation. It’s a great work, mind you! It’s like carrying the Holy Grail to some of these way-back farmhouses. And I wish there were a thousand Parnassuses instead of this one.”

Christopher Morley. Parnassus on Wheels (Kindle Locations 779-787). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

In other words, he is a kind of Johnny Appleseed of books – spreading good literature wherever it will take root. Half the fun of reading Parnassus On Wheels is catching all the literary references Helen and Mifflin drop. One morning, Helen describes herself “as chipper as any Robert W. Chambers heroine.’ One of Mifflin’s colorful oaths is, “by the bones of George Eliot”. Harold Bell Wright earns a mention, and Henry James comes in for some criticism:

A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that’s all forehead doesn’t amount to much. Anyway, it’ll never get over at a Dorcas meeting. That was the trouble with Henry James. Andrew talked so much about him that I took one of his books to read aloud at our sewing circle over at Redfield. Well, after one try we had to fall back on Pollyanna.

Christopher Morley. Parnassus on Wheels (Kindle Locations 1377-1381). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

Even though Mifflin intends to return to Brooklyn to write the book he’s been planning, he keeps popping up at opportune times. They have a run-in with some unscrupulous hobos, Helen’s brother Andrew persists in thinking Mifflin is a conman and his sister has gone crazy, and Mifflin gets arrested. It’s all a lot of fun, and this gentle adventure story is a nice window into rural American life at the turn of the twentieth century.

Back then, people were quite hospitable: every time Helen stops at a farmhouse with her bookstore on wheels, she is welcomed by the family, given a meal, and invited to spend the night. Life moved at a much slower pace; people took the time to talk and get to know each other. The only distraction was the telephone – no radio, television, or internet, of course. The only entertainment available was provided by families themselves – reading a book aloud, playing some music, etc. In our age of instant, near-infinite choices of music and video, we’ve lost some simpler pleasures. 

I enjoyed Parnassus On Wheels so much that I plan to dive straight into its sequel, The Haunted Bookshop. That will be the subject of my next post!