Illustration by Kieran Yanner

Who Fears the Devil?

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

When Erik first presented me with the manuscript for Who Fears the Devil? by Manly Wade Wellman, my first thought was likely the same as yours:

Who the heck names their son "Manly"?

Yet Mr. Wellman is from a different time and a different place, and it's precisely this distance which sets him most apart. For you see, unlike many of the classic pulp stories we've published in Planet Stories, Who Fears the Devil? isn't just a fun adventure, some purely whimsical construction of an author paid to imagine things. It's a piece of Americana, a historical artifact steeped in the legends and lore of Appalachia, and its stories carry the weight of truth. This is Neil Gaiman's American Gods mashed up with Johnny Cash, and by the end you feel like you've absorbed a college class's-worth of American folklore. And where some older stories feel anachronistic today, Wellman's still has life. For even today, strange things might lurk back in the misty hills where the roads don't go, where folk live simple in sod-roofed houses, picking banjos and tilling tiny hidden valleys, praying to the good lord to protect them from witch men and the creatures scratching at their windows....

I know I've said it before (and I'll likely say it again), this is hands-down my favorite Planet Stories book. Not only is the material fascinating—an entire folkloric tradition that I've somehow remained woefully ignorant of until now—but Manly Wade Wellman is a true master of the short story. Through the no-holds-barred patois of Silver John, the two-fisted hobo saint who travels endlessly in search of rare songs and legends, we are instantly and completely plunged into another world that rings with authenticity and a strange sort of comfort, as if these were ghost stories told by a kindly grandfather. This is fantasy of a breed you've likely never seen before, and if that sounds like hyperbole, perhaps the fact that Mr. Wellman was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and famously beat out William Faulkner for the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Award (a slight for which Faulkner, one of the most important American authors of all time, reportedly never forgave him) will convince you to give him a shot.

Who Fears the Devil? has all the weirdness of an RPG sourcebook and all the comfort of your grandmother's quilt. Curl up with it. You won't be disappointed.

James Sutter
Fiction Editor