Something About Eve

Something About Eve opens as a witty, philosophical fantasy-comedy in which desire, temptation, and human folly collide. Gerald Musgrave, a young writer and student of magic, is interrupted by Glaum of the Haunting Eyes, a spectral being once human who offers him a perilous bargain: Gerald may pursue the great art of magic, while Glaum takes over his body. Gerald eagerly agrees, driven by vanity, ambition, and his tangled affair with Evelyn Townsend, an adulterous entanglement he cannot honorably end and cannot quite abandon. The exchange of identities turns into a comic struggle over romance, art, and reality itself. Two versions of Gerald confront each other in the library, arguing over unfinished manuscripts, especially Gerald's romance of Dom Manuel of Poictesme and Niafer, which Glaum derides as sentimental nonsense. The novel broadens into satire on Southern gentility, masculine honor, and the absurd social rules that conceal but never resolve scandal. Amid these comic reversals, Gerald's encounters with the Sphinx deepen the book's metaphysical play. Through sharp, playful debate about pleasure, sleep, art, religion, and interpretation, the novel becomes a sly meditation on what human life means—and whether stories, like lives, ever truly end. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.