Customer Reviews

Owls Hoot in the Daytime & Other Omens: Selected Stories of Manly Wade Wellman (Volume 5)

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An extraordinary collection of stories that is well worth reading. If you can find the long out of print paperback collection titled John the Balladeer, you'll find the same tales.

Each one is a tale where right and justice prevail or perhaps, more accurately, where evil rebounds upon the practioner thereof. "O Ugly Bird!" is perhaps the most famous and is certainly a wonderful introduction to Silver John. "Vandy,Vandy" is among my favorites (yes, children, US quarters were made of silver at one time). "On the Hills and Everywhere" is a grand and too long ignored Christmas story.

While somewhat dated, the hero of one story is a young college student just back from the Korean war, they're are all entertaining "backwoods yarns".

Volume Five of editor John Pelen's THE SELECTED STORIES OF MANLY WADE WELLMAN rounds off the permanent edition of Wellman's short supernatural fiction with a complete collection of the popular Silver John the Balladeer tales originally published (mostly) in THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION. These deliciously spooky and atmospheric mood pieces combine the rich flavor of authentic regional folklore with Wellman's sterling imagination and storytelling gifts.

John Pelen is owed a debt of gratitude for this five-volume collection which establishes Wellman, who was one of the best of the original WEIRD TALES writers, in the ranks of such luminaries as Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, August Derleth, William Hope Hodgeson, Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft.

Wellman's several Silver John novels also deserve to be collected in such attractive form.

This 5th volume of the series has the same contents as the paperback version of John the Balladeer, even including the introduction, so unlike the first four volumes it won't be new material to most of Wellman's fans. It is nice to see John's stories in a binding befitting their quality, though. (One tiny niggle: I sort of wish they'd used silver instead of gilt on the cover of this one.) The series in general is well done, nicely bound, and brings together a lot of material that is both worth reading and otherwise difficult to find.

Silver John wanders the Appachalian Mountains with his guitar strung with silver strings in search of adventure and good songs. On the way, he finds various supernatural opponents and he vanquishes them. That's the story, but it is so much more than that the way Manly Wade Wellman tells it. This is writing of the highest order and stories actually based on mountain folk tales and superstitions. Please, I beg of you, read these stories. It's hard to describe, but Wellman's writing is just so wonderful and his characters so well drawn. This is GREAT stuff.

This book introduces the reader once again to Silver John , the balladeer guitarist . Silver John encounters many strange things in his life as a travelling guitar man including a train which runs when there are no tracks. One of Silver John's many gifts seems to be that of 'Excorcist" as he vanquishes evil,ghosties and ghoulies into the night. This is an excellent compilation from a very talented writer.

This volume includes the excellent Silver John stories. Wellman's ear for the language of the mountains is uncanny -- he never falters in any of the stories. If you're a Wellman fan, this one is a must.