Galatea may seem strange Cain to those who link him with California and violent stories out of the West. But to those who knew him earlier, particularly his origins in Annapolis and his life in the counties near by, it will hardly come as a surprise. Cain returned to southern Maryland to find it startlingly changed. Cogitating this transformation from oxcarts, scrub woods, and plug tobacco to grand boulevards, lumber, and big auction rooms, he found himself inventing a novel about it. The result is Galatea, the story of Holly Valenty, a girl who is a product of the old dispensation, but who succumbs to the temptations of the new, a story with all the Cain magic — brutal, shocking, yet tender and believable