Episode 23: 'Unseen - Unfeared' by Francis Stevens
We reach the fourth in a run of relatively obscure, hard-to-find short stories with this story by Francis Stevens, the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett. Stevens is regarded by many as a pioneer of science fiction and has been labelled "the woman who invented dark fantasy". Her work predates that of H.P. Lovecraft and it is said that he was an admirer. Like Lovecraft, she contributed to Weird Tales magazine.
Indeed, this story (Unseen - Unfeared, first published in the February People's Favorite Magazine, 1919) anticipates some of the themes and ideas that would become Lovecraftian tropes. It concerns a man who, after dining with his detective friend, has what can only be described as a "funny turn" in which he begins to find the poor residents of a predominantly immigrant neighbourhood "revolting" and frightening. Needing a dark room to rest in, he enters a building advertising some sort of exhibition called "See the Unseen", but nothing could prepare him for the horrors that await...
Stevens' body of work spans a mere four years from 1917 to 1920 (she was writing to support a household, having lost her husband and her father, and raising a child while looking after her invalid mother), during which time she penned a handful of novels and less than a dozen short stories and novellas. Despite the plausible claims about Stevens' status as a pioneer of sci-fi, she remains a little unsung. Unseen - Unheard only came to my attention, for example, through its inclusion in the VanderMeers-edited The Weird anthology.
It's a superb story though - notable for its odd structure which plunges its first-person narrator (Blaisdell) into a nightmare situation, then appears to explain it away with a Scooby-Doo-esque unravelling, only to end on a note of uncertainty.
Purists should note that, for my recording of the story, I have made some minor textual changes to remove the explicitly racial nature of Blaisdell's anxiety. I have done so to avoid any possible censorship from YouTube etc. but also because, to our modern ears and eyes, such language is jarring. While I am not, by nature, a censorious person, I felt, in this instance, that the offending sentences undermined what I believe to be Stevens' ultimately positive intentions, and risked alienating listeners early on. However, should you wish to read the text as originally published it is available in the aforementioned Weird anthology and online (Project Gutenberg, Australia).
If you're intrigued by Unseen - Unfeared there are a few analyses of it online. This is a particularly good one: https://paperknife.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/the-weird-unseen-unfeared-francis-stevens/
Your ever-interesting friend,
Jasper
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Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4125-night-break
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All sound effects sourced at Freesound.org
The recording was created using Audacity and BandLab. Podcast hosted by Anchor.
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