The Hauntings of Hood Canal

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Jack Cady is one of those writers whom I keep expecting to make a big splash, but who never quite never caught on with the public imagination. He’s what’s known as a writer’s writer, which is at once the highest compliment and the kiss of death. Cady wrote prolifically and beautifully, gliding with an almost unbelievable grace over the perceived limitations of genre. His body of work offers all the particular satisfactions of fantasy while at the same time—to borrow a phrase from Salman Rushdie—it “aspires to the condition of literature.”

My first encounter with Jack Cady’s fiction came when I was in my early twenties. My friend, the writer Dale Bailey, turned me on to a story called “The Night We Buried Road Dog,” published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I was a young writer with ambitions of my own, and this story seemed like a revelation to me. Cady wrote with a lyrical beauty of a kind very rarely encountered in genre fiction—or anywhere, really—and, equally as striking to me, he wrote about country people. They may have been from the Northwest, about as far from my own Southern context as one might get and still be in the contiguous United States, but I recognized those people all the same: poor, struggling, often born wretched, yet striving for some personal definition of nobility.

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