Who Fears The Devil? by Manly Wade Wellman

He may have wasted time in Europe and at Columbia, but Wellman captures the voice of the region ever bit as well as Ron Rash or David Joy. Or at least one.Īnyway, being a genuine hillbilly, and just the right particular sort of hillbilly for the job at hand, can I say that Wellman, outsider that he was, captures the voice of my people, lest my lived experiences suffer erasure? Damn straight I can. Wagner says there “hadn’t been anything like the John stories at that time, and there hasn’t been since.” I reckon I could dig up a few. Wagner, like Wellman, and like Andy Griffith and Vic Huggins, lived in Chapel Hill despite knowing better. I’m not sure when that one was written, but Wagner has been dead since 1994, so not recently. It also has an “introduction” of sorts by Karl Edward Wagner. The two-volume edition will contain all five novels and is available for pre-order now.Īnyway, the Paizo edition has an introduction by Mike Resnick. Haffner Press’ upcoming The Complete John the Balladeer.

This is billed as a complete collection of the Silver John short stories, but Wellman also wrote five novels about John. Unfortunately, it is now out of print and offered at an obscene price every time lately I’ve checked on Amazon. I picked up a copy of Paizo’s Hidden Worlds and Ancient Mysteries Planet Stories, The Complete Tales of Silver John, Who Fears the Devil?, presented by (and with an introduction from) Mike Resnick (2010). He may also be a parallel universe Johnny Cash. He is more usually known as John the Balladeer or Silver John. At least that’s the only way his name is given in the stories. You can imagine my interest then, when I discovered that an Appendix N and Weird Tales stalwart, Manly Wade Wellman, wrote an entire series of short stories very much rooted in the lore of my people.

Much like that Texas “folklore.” The difference, of course, merely being one of perceptive.

Growing up in the mountains of North Carolina, I grew up with ghost stories. I sometimes say I didn’t discover speculative fiction until my mom forced The Hobbit on me, but that isn’t quite true. The consensus was that they were writing speculative fiction, and good speculative fiction, but that it was getting published as folklore. gorilla in the room, Texans were grossly underrepresented in the pulps. I went to a panel at the WorldCon in San Antonio a few years back on Texas Pulp SF.

Who Fears The Devil? by Manly Wade Wellman