"Haunted by a history that hurts - the loss of so many men in her life, the ravages of war, the struggle to survive and its seemingly hopelessness - Stevens gives us stories that plunge us in despair while also pulling us onward. Her writings are not a part of a neglected tradition, but a definitional one. 'Dark Fantasy', and its perverse psychic wiring, defines the age we live in, and why her books are our lamps in the night, our portals before a darkness." – Ashraf Jamal Dark Fantasy takes the otherworldly elements of fantasy and aligns them with the concepts of ancestral curses, supernatural events and the intrusion of the past creating a space suited to the cathartic exploration of psychological trauma.
It is a genre currently made famous by the likes of Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, but begins with the works of Gertrude Barrows Bennett (aka Francis Stevens) collected in this book. A book containing tales of gods, hidden cities and time travel written almost 100 years ago.
