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The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories
When three people in Philadelphia inhale dust developed by a scientist who has discovered parallel universes, they are transported into an interdimensional no-man’s land that is populated by supernatural beings. From there, they go on to an alternate-future version of Philadelphia—a frightening dystopian nation-state in which citizens are numbered, not named. How will they escape?
In The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories, introduced by Lisa Yaszek, you will find this world-bending story as well as five others written by Francis Stevens, the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, a pioneering science fiction and fantasy adventure writer from Minneapolis who made her literary debut at the precocious age of 17.
Often celebrated as “the woman who invented dark fantasy,” Bennett possessed incredible range; her groundbreaking stories—produced largely between 1904 and 1919—suggest that she is better understood as the mother of modern genre fiction writ large. Bennett’s work has anticipated everything from the work of Philip K. Dick to Superman comics to The Hunger Games, making it as relevant now as it ever was.
Francis Stevens (Gertrude Barrows Bennett, 1884-1948) was the first American woman to publish widely in fantasy and science fiction. Her five short stories and seven longer works of fiction, all of which appeared in pulp magazines such as Argosy, All-Story Weekly, and Weird Tales, would influence everyone from H.P Lovecraft to C.L. Moore.
In The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories, introduced by Lisa Yaszek, you will find this world-bending story as well as five others written by Francis Stevens, the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, a pioneering science fiction and fantasy adventure writer from Minneapolis who made her literary debut at the precocious age of 17.
Often celebrated as “the woman who invented dark fantasy,” Bennett possessed incredible range; her groundbreaking stories—produced largely between 1904 and 1919—suggest that she is better understood as the mother of modern genre fiction writ large. Bennett’s work has anticipated everything from the work of Philip K. Dick to Superman comics to The Hunger Games, making it as relevant now as it ever was.
Francis Stevens (Gertrude Barrows Bennett, 1884-1948) was the first American woman to publish widely in fantasy and science fiction. Her five short stories and seven longer works of fiction, all of which appeared in pulp magazines such as Argosy, All-Story Weekly, and Weird Tales, would influence everyone from H.P Lovecraft to C.L. Moore.
400 pages, Paperback
First published September 17, 2024
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About the author
Francis Stevens
109 books58 followersGertrude Barrows Bennett (1883–1948) was the first major female writer of fantasy and science fiction in the United States, publishing her stories under the pseudonym Francis Stevens. Bennett wrote a number of highly acclaimed fantasies between 1917 and 1923 and has been called "the woman who invented dark fantasy." Among her most famous books are Claimed (which H. P. Lovecraft called "One of the strangest and most compelling science fantasy novels you will ever read")[4] and the lost world novel The Citadel of Fear. Bennett also wrote an early dystopian novel, The Heads of Cerberus (1919).
Gertrude Mabel Barrows was born in Minneapolis in 1883. She completed school through the eighth grade, then attended night school in hopes of becoming an illustrator (a goal she never achieved). Instead, she began working as a stenographer, a job she held on and off for the rest of her life. In 1909 Barrows married Stewart Bennett, a British journalist and explorer, and moved to Philadelphia. A year later her husband died while on an expedition. With a new-born daughter to raise, Bennett continued working as a stenographer. When her father died toward the end of World War I, Bennett assumed care for her invalid mother.
During this time period Bennett began to write a number of short stories and novels, only stopping when her mother died in 1920. In the mid 1920s, she moved to California. Because Bennett was estranged from her daughter, for a number of years researchers believed Bennett died in 1939 (the date of her final letter to her daughter). However, new research, including her death certificate, shows that she died in 1948.
Gertrude Mabel Barrows was born in Minneapolis in 1883. She completed school through the eighth grade, then attended night school in hopes of becoming an illustrator (a goal she never achieved). Instead, she began working as a stenographer, a job she held on and off for the rest of her life. In 1909 Barrows married Stewart Bennett, a British journalist and explorer, and moved to Philadelphia. A year later her husband died while on an expedition. With a new-born daughter to raise, Bennett continued working as a stenographer. When her father died toward the end of World War I, Bennett assumed care for her invalid mother.
During this time period Bennett began to write a number of short stories and novels, only stopping when her mother died in 1920. In the mid 1920s, she moved to California. Because Bennett was estranged from her daughter, for a number of years researchers believed Bennett died in 1939 (the date of her final letter to her daughter). However, new research, including her death certificate, shows that she died in 1948.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 4, 2024
Read my review: https://www.mwgerard.com/review-heads...
Francis Stevens (real name Gertrude Barrows Bennett) published her first story in 1904. She was just 17 years old. Like the teenage Mary Shelley and Frankenstein before her, she changed how speculative fiction would be written afterwards, but for some reason Stevens is not a household name. Hopefully, that is about to change.
Stevens’ writing is both reflective of the societal upheaval in her time and freshly insightful. And frighteningly, there are intense similarities to tensions today. Her clear-eyed, laser pointed writing strips away any pretense, leaving the simple truth to make the reader queasy.
“The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar” (1904) was published just five years after Marie Curie discovered radium, an otherworldly, glowing substance. It was just two years after the Wright Brothers managed powered flight and Marconi sent the first radio transmission across the Atlantic. Scientific advancement was not only taking wild leaps — it was in the direction of the unseen and untethered.
In the short story, narrated by Dunbar in the first person, he awakes in an unfamiliar room with unfamiliar people. Dunbar can tell has been injured, though he seems to be healing fairly quickly. When he moves about to explore his surroundings, he finds himself in some kind of factory or industrial facility (suitably steampunk). When a worker is trapped above a vat of something horrible, Dunbar leaps to the rescue with a superhuman strength he didn’t have before the mysterious accident. The story presages both aspects alien abduction accounts to come and the superhero origin story.
“Friend Island” was published at the close of World War I and the height of a deadly influenza epidemic. The first-person narrator is a shipwreck castaway who manages to find the shores of a mild island. It abounds with fruit and fresh water, and she finds herself content to await rescue. But once a bit of loneliness sets in, the weather grows dreary and threatening. And something else like unease begins to set in. “Friend Island” uses “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as its inspiration and brings it into a proto-futuristic world.
“Behind the Curtain”, also published in 1918, is a direct descendant of a Poe story — a mysterious sarcophagus, a dead wife, an empty house, and a trusting friend. Stevens even invokes a different tone, a different cadence for this story as if it really were written 80 years earlier.
“Unseen–Unfeared” is a modern magician’s tale that blurs the line between sorcery and science. After all, to many the Radium Age was just that. “The Elf-Trap” imagines what happens when a noted natural scientist is lured into a fairy world. Written in 1919, it is no doubt influenced by the trouble of the Cottingley Fairies and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Those are the short stories included in the book, but the title The Heads of Cerberus is the main novel. A group of three friends finds a small antiquity — a jar with three dog heads — and they touch the grey dust within. They are at once transported to another realm and attempt to find their way back home. Through a portal, they recognize their Philadelphia home but it is only minutes before they are arrested for not wearing their ‘numbers’ badge. They quickly realize this is a parallel future Philadelphia.
From 1919, the novel extrapolates the consequences of the Bolshevik Revolution with striking accuracy. The travellers find themselves in a Soviet-like state where no one (except the very special people at the top) are allowed to be individual, where dissenters are punished or killed, and where libraries and information are forbidden. They have to manipulate their way to freedom in a world where the rules are arbitrary and unknown. The adventure is entertaining, but some of the encounters begin to feel repetitive. Stevens’ short form stories are much more affecting and show the sheer range of her abilities as a writer.
Anyone who enjoys speculative or science fiction like The Twilight Zone, or steampunk like Jules Verne, or dystopian novels like The Hunger Games needs to be reading Francis Stevens.
My thanks to David at MIT Press for the review copy.
Francis Stevens (real name Gertrude Barrows Bennett) published her first story in 1904. She was just 17 years old. Like the teenage Mary Shelley and Frankenstein before her, she changed how speculative fiction would be written afterwards, but for some reason Stevens is not a household name. Hopefully, that is about to change.
Stevens’ writing is both reflective of the societal upheaval in her time and freshly insightful. And frighteningly, there are intense similarities to tensions today. Her clear-eyed, laser pointed writing strips away any pretense, leaving the simple truth to make the reader queasy.
“The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar” (1904) was published just five years after Marie Curie discovered radium, an otherworldly, glowing substance. It was just two years after the Wright Brothers managed powered flight and Marconi sent the first radio transmission across the Atlantic. Scientific advancement was not only taking wild leaps — it was in the direction of the unseen and untethered.
In the short story, narrated by Dunbar in the first person, he awakes in an unfamiliar room with unfamiliar people. Dunbar can tell has been injured, though he seems to be healing fairly quickly. When he moves about to explore his surroundings, he finds himself in some kind of factory or industrial facility (suitably steampunk). When a worker is trapped above a vat of something horrible, Dunbar leaps to the rescue with a superhuman strength he didn’t have before the mysterious accident. The story presages both aspects alien abduction accounts to come and the superhero origin story.
“Friend Island” was published at the close of World War I and the height of a deadly influenza epidemic. The first-person narrator is a shipwreck castaway who manages to find the shores of a mild island. It abounds with fruit and fresh water, and she finds herself content to await rescue. But once a bit of loneliness sets in, the weather grows dreary and threatening. And something else like unease begins to set in. “Friend Island” uses “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as its inspiration and brings it into a proto-futuristic world.
“Behind the Curtain”, also published in 1918, is a direct descendant of a Poe story — a mysterious sarcophagus, a dead wife, an empty house, and a trusting friend. Stevens even invokes a different tone, a different cadence for this story as if it really were written 80 years earlier.
“Unseen–Unfeared” is a modern magician’s tale that blurs the line between sorcery and science. After all, to many the Radium Age was just that. “The Elf-Trap” imagines what happens when a noted natural scientist is lured into a fairy world. Written in 1919, it is no doubt influenced by the trouble of the Cottingley Fairies and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Those are the short stories included in the book, but the title The Heads of Cerberus is the main novel. A group of three friends finds a small antiquity — a jar with three dog heads — and they touch the grey dust within. They are at once transported to another realm and attempt to find their way back home. Through a portal, they recognize their Philadelphia home but it is only minutes before they are arrested for not wearing their ‘numbers’ badge. They quickly realize this is a parallel future Philadelphia.
From 1919, the novel extrapolates the consequences of the Bolshevik Revolution with striking accuracy. The travellers find themselves in a Soviet-like state where no one (except the very special people at the top) are allowed to be individual, where dissenters are punished or killed, and where libraries and information are forbidden. They have to manipulate their way to freedom in a world where the rules are arbitrary and unknown. The adventure is entertaining, but some of the encounters begin to feel repetitive. Stevens’ short form stories are much more affecting and show the sheer range of her abilities as a writer.
Anyone who enjoys speculative or science fiction like The Twilight Zone, or steampunk like Jules Verne, or dystopian novels like The Hunger Games needs to be reading Francis Stevens.
My thanks to David at MIT Press for the review copy.
February 1, 2025
I was very excited to find this title in the Radium Age series—the book itself is very well constructed, which is not always the case with obscure reprints! I recently read Claimed! by the same author (Gertrude Barrows Bennett), which I thought was excellent, so I was eager to see more of her writing. Ultimately I did not enjoy Heads of Cerberus as much as I had hoped to, though it did have some really unusual and striking imagery. I’ll also admit that as a resident of Philadelphia, I was particularly interested in what someone writing in 1919 would imagine as a dystopian future for the city. This is where I felt somewhat disappointed; typically this sort of time travel/dystopian future scenario is used to cast light on (or satirize) the author’s present (like Wells in The Time Machine, or many other authors writing since Barrows Bennett). Here, I was left feeling that she wasn’t quite sure what critique she wanted to make, unless it was too specific to the politics of the city at the time (which is distinctly possible). Certainly the sense that Philadelphia could consist of a small number of powerful elites taking what they want at will while the majority of the population is reduced to numbers, feels just as realistic now as it might have in 1919. Maybe it’s just that this sort of narrative has been so common in the second half of the 20th Century that it’s just harder to feel the impact of something that was far less precedented when it was first published.
For me, Barrows Bennett really shines when she leans into “Weirdness”—and the short stories gave her more room to explore this. My favorite story in this collection was Unseen—Unfeared, which deserves to be more widely known. The Elf-Trap and Friend Island were also both top-tier stories for me.
For me, Barrows Bennett really shines when she leans into “Weirdness”—and the short stories gave her more room to explore this. My favorite story in this collection was Unseen—Unfeared, which deserves to be more widely known. The Elf-Trap and Friend Island were also both top-tier stories for me.
February 15, 2025
3.5 stars. I bought this collection of sci-fi short stories at a local bookstore not knowing that Francis Stevens (Gertrude Mabel Barrows Bennett) was a pioneering female sci-fi author of the early 1900s (I just was drawn to a collection of sci-fi short stories!). My favorite in the collection was the titular novella where a group of friends travel to an alternate universe version of Philadelphia. The pacing was excellent and there were some very interesting descriptions. Some of the character development and significance of the symbolism/dystopian changes didn’t quite hit for me, but maybe would have worked better for her contemporaries.
January 17, 2026
I am a big fan of the Radium Age series from MIT Press. The Heads Of Cerberus fills most of this book. It is an interesting time travel story, giving us an uncomfortable glimpse of a future Philadelphia. Five much shorter stories rounding out the collection. One of these, “Behind the Curtain,” is a nice homage to Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado.” The Radium Age books, mostly written 1900-1935, show science fiction finding its feet. The authors are building on Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and experimenting with style and genre. I’m very happy MIT Press is doing this.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews