Manly Wade Wellman

Today, May 21, marks the birth of Manly Wade Wellman (1903-1986). Wellman is best remembered for his stories of the John the Balladeer, set in the Appalachian mountains. But he wrote a lot of other things, as well.

I first discovered Wellman’s short stories in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.  He had a number of  stories published there in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Someone who had had a subscription had sold an almost complete run to the local second hand bookstore when I was in high school. Wellman’s stories were among the first I read when I picked up an issue with his name on the cover.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, Wellman is a favorite around these here parts, so in honor of his birth, in addition to raising a glass in his honor later this evening, I’m going to look at three of his stories that feature the same  character, Sergeant Jaeger.

First is “Fearful Rock”.  Originally published in the February 1939 issue of Weird Tales, the central character of this novella is Lt. Lanark. He and Jaeger are leading a cavalry patrol in Missouri during the Civil War, looking for Quantrill. What they find is a young woman being sacrificed by her step-father to the Nameless One in an abandoned house under the shadow of a formation known as Fearful Rock. They manage to rescue the girl, and Lanark promises to return after the war. He does and finds Jaeger has gotten there ahead of him. Jaeger is the local parson. Lanark is going to need his help. The evil is still in the region.

“Coven”(Weird Tales, July 1942)  is a sequel to “Fearful Rock”, but it opens during the Civil War in the eastern portion of the war.  The narrator is a boy named Cole Wickett, who is fourteen and a captured Confederate prisoner.  Jaeger and a local minister recruit him to help with a small problem, a local vampire. That sequence alone makes a good story, but the bulk of the tale takes place about ten years later, when Wickett, cold and hungry is wandering the countryside in Missouri and runs into Jaeger after helping rescue a man who is being whipped. During the rescue Wickett observes a winged creature with horns flying about. Jaeger again recruits Wickett to help eliminate the evil.

Both of these stories are available in the paperback reprint of Worse Things Waiting, originally published by Carcosa in 1973. This is the version I recommend, since you get over 400 pages of Wellman’s short fiction, much of it originally published in Weird Tales. If you only want to read “Fearful Rock” and “Coven”, then they are available in electronic format in The Curse of Fearful Rock for only $0.99.

The third story is “Toad’s Foot”, which tells the tale of Jaeger returning the Fearful Rock area after the war and what he found there. It’s set between the two parts of “Fearful Rock”.  It’s the shortest of the three Jaeger stories, and it was published in the April 1979 issue of F&SF.  It was almost certainly one of the stories I read back in high school, although that has been so long ago, I don’t have any actual memory of it. I thought it was the best of the three stories. The writing is more polished. Wellman had 40 years of experience since he’d written “Fearful Rock”.

Unfortunately, this story isn’t in print, and it isn’t in The Curse of Fearful Rock. The ISFDB doesn’t even list it as being a Jaeger story. The only place all three have been published together, AFAIK, is the Night Shade collection Fearful Rock and Other Precarious Locales. That was in 2001. Good luck getting your hands on a copy. The cheapest copies I found online start at just over $100.

I think it’s time someone published an affordable collection of Wellman’s non-John the Balldeer stories. He was a unique writer with an original voice who deserves to be more widely read.