Customer Reviews

The Devil is Not Mocked & Other Warnings: Selected Stories of Manly Wade Wellman (Volume 2) (v. 2)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Wellman was one of the great American fantasists, and this series is pretty much the definitive Wellman collection. John Pelan has done a great job selecting the stories, and the book itself is of high quality. It will look good on your shelf, it will last through many readings - and you really aren't going to be able to find the original stories in paperbacks and pulps. You just want to read, and the price is quite reasonable when you think about how much time and money you'd spend on the first editions. Even reprints of this stuff are hard to track down.

It's kind of like the horror equivalent of the NESFA Press collections, like the three-volume Hal Clement omnibus - great stories that aren't easy to find, collected and presented.

Kudos to Pelan and Nightshade for giving us a great edition of hard-to-find, high quality horror. Let's hope they keep it up with other authors, I'll keep buying them.

Another good collection of Wellman stories, well written and enjoyable. "Ever the Faith Endures" is my favorite here, a nice little tale of a man visiting a distant British relation and finding out a surprising family secret. "The Theatre Upstairs" is a nice weird story of revenge, while the title story features a Nazi general taking over a Romanian castle with only one occupant (not hard to guess who the occupant was). Over two dozen stories in all, with something for everyone.

While I probably enjoyed the first book of this series better (as those stories had a solid character linking them all together) there are some great stories in this volume. One very nice thing about these tales is that many of them can be read in a single sitting. For someone like myself with a busy schedule, it means that I can pick them up, finish one (or sometimes even two) off and go a few days before picking the book up again. There isn't the loss of continuity that you can sometimes get with a longer work read the same way. Overall, the price is rather reasonable for a hardcover that reprints hart-to-find material, I just wish that the next volume (three) would get some kind of discount (it is the only one of the series that doesn't for some odd reason).

During my first reading in 2004 (?!) I had rushed through these stories, but this time I had savoured them slowly, so that the heady mix of fast pace and the exquisite southern flavour can be better appreciated. Hidden, between the hard covers of this book, lie several jewels of weird fiction, most famous of them being the titular story where a Nazi General meets his comeuppance at the hand of a certain Count inhabiting the "Devil's Castle" in Transylvania. Apart from him, we come across witches, familiars, demons, evil spirits, aliens (?!), evil creepers (one of them unparalleled in fiction in its villainy), devil-worshipers (deliberate or unintended), and everything in the unique voice of Manly Wade Wellman, which is gentle, grave, powerful and yet piercingly effective.

I solemnly wish that the Night Shade Press would be persuaded to reprint this volume, or to issue it in Paperback format, so that a far larger readership gets the opportunity to appreciate the genius of Manly Wade Wellman.

Anything by Manly Wade Wellman is worth reading. This is no exception. He was so great at regional horror as well as traditional horror and even Lovecraftian horror. Please, if you love good horror, get all 5 of Wellman's books from Night Shade Books. They are all well bound, good looking books and they all have Wellman's wonderful prose.