Manly Wellman sounds like a pseudonym. He was actually a writer of – what? Modern American folktales or fairytales, I suppose – little slices of American Gothic, the best known of which were set in the Appalachians and featured Silver John.
I was reminded of them by a very well-written role-playing game blog called Grognardia (if you ever played these things, I commend it to you).
I hadn’t read “The Desrick on Yandro” since I was 12 or so, but when I re-read it online it still made me grin and shiver in a ratio of about 3:1. If you’re 12, or liked being 12, give it a go; you can find it here along with the rest of the short stories.
Well, I did say I was going to talk about my likes and dislikes. But I think it’s worth saying what’s so good about these stories from a writer’s point of view – and here it is…
They’re short. Seriously, they say what they have to say, take their bow and exit. Crisply written in a convincing (to me) Appalachian idiom, with real people drawn in a few bold strokes, they don’t suffer from novella bloat, that disease of the literary short story that makes it swell up and try to be a baby novel.
Someone should try and adapt these for TV or, maybe even better, radio. H’mmm…wonder what the rights are going for…?
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