and sacrifices it in his own self-interest. His later
adventures include an amusing sequence in which
he sells fraudulent magical feathers that are so
convincing that actual miraculous events follow.
The High Place(1923) is a combination of a
quest story and a deal with the devil. Florian, the
not particularly admirable protagonist, falls in love
with a woman who has been enchanted into an
endless sleep and rescues her by promising to sacri-
fice their first child to his benefactor, and a confus-
ing but amusing sequence follows when a meddling
saint tries to save the child. Florian discovers that
the woman he loves is intolerably stupid, the pact
is circumvented, and eventually time itself is
turned about to produce, if not a happy ending, at
least a clever one. The Music from behind the Moon
(1926) is a very minor fantasy in which one of
Manuel’s daughters is first imprisoned on the
moon, then freed through chicanery.
Cabell’s next two novels were both outstand-
ing. The Silver Stallion(1926) takes place shortly
after Manuel’s death. The Fellowship of the Silver
Stallion is dissolved, and the various members
have separate adventures, including one in which
a magician discovers that the world was once ruled
by a nonhuman race reminiscent of the Cthulhu
Mythos by H. P. LOVECRAFT. Other characters
meet their fate in often comical fashion, encounter
demons, find hidden libraries, die in battle and get
sent to the wrong heaven, and discover some
truths about the great Manuel. Something About
Eve(1927) is a magical exploration of different as-
pects of the female persona and contains a number
of episodes, including a very funny satire on book
reviewing. The White Robe(1928) is a compara-
tively minor piece about a magical robe whose
wearer is physically transformed into a werewolf,
and The Way of Ecben(1929) is only slightly more
interesting. Cabell seemed to have exhausted his
imagination by this point, and his subsequent
work, though always clever and sometimes inter-
esting, is comparatively minor.
The most ambitious of his later fantasies is the
thematically related trilogy consisting of Smirt: An
Urbane Nightmare(1934), Smith: A Sylvan Interlude
(1935), and Smire: An Acceptance in the Third Per-
son (1937). The first and last consist largely of
thinly veiled attacks against features of contempo-
rary culture that Cabell found repressive, while the
middle is an episodic medieval adventure. All
three involve different aspects of a single character
who is theoretically exploring reality through his
dreams, although the underlying plot is often inco-
herent or undetectable. They were published in an
omnibus edition as The Nightmare Has Triplets
(1972). There Were Two Pirates(1946) is a histori-
cal novel that involves some low-key ghostly ap-
pearances, and The Devil’s Own Dear Son(1949) is
a minor religious satire. Cabell is still highly re-
garded for his better efforts, and the James Branch
Cabell Society for many years published Kalki,a
magazine devoted to study of his career.Cady, Jack(1932–2004)
Although Jack Cady had begun writing short hor-
ror fiction as early as 1970, it was not until the
publication of his first horror novel, The Well
(1980), that he attracted any extensive attention.
Although the book is essentially a haunted house
story, it was both unusually restrained, with little
overt supernaturalism until the closing chapters,
and intelligently written both in terms of concept
and style. Cady developed his horrors with subtlety
and raised the level of suspense by implication
rather than more explicit descriptions and actions.
His follow-up novel, The Jonah Watch(1981), was
even more impressive. A Coast Guard cutter be-
comes icebound off the coast of Maine. Strange
voices are subsequently heard from time to time,
and the crew becomes convinced that there is, in
fact, a Jonah among them. Eventually, suppressed
fear turns to open violence in what might have
been a straightforward psychological adventure
story, but Cady includes a genuinely supernatural
series of events.
Two of Cady’s novels appeared under the pen
name Pat Franklin. Dark Dreaming(1991) has only
marginal supernatural content for most of its
length. A woman experiences increasingly fright-
ening dreams that appear to have been invaded by
a malevolent entity, which eventually manifests it-
self physically. Embrace of the Wolf(1993) is even
more ambiguous. One of the residents of a wonder-
fully evoked town is influenced by an unspecified
animalistic spirit. Cady reverted to his own name42 Cady, Jack