![]() ![]() The Ugly Bird itself is a vicious buzzardlike companion with some strange connection to Onselm himself. ![]() ![]() In "O Ugly Bird!" John runs afoul of a vile little witch-man named Mr Onselm, who's terrorizing the honest farmers of a little town with his accomplice. Wellman has a masterful use of dialect, never overdone but always reflecting the mountain folks' traditional viewpoints, and he clearly loves the scenery and beauty of that area. ![]() He encounters a wide variety of odd phenomena, sometimes menacing and sometimes charming, and you never know how one of these stories is going to turn out. The John stories are told in the first person by a wandering minstrel who roams the mountains of North Carolina with not much more than the clothes he has on and a guitar strung with silver strings. Wellman later revived the character for some slim novelettes, but the short stories were collected into a 1964 Ballantine paperback, WHO FEARS THE DEVIL?, which is almost unbearably good. From the December 1951 issue of THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY ASCIENCE-FICTION, this was the first in a long series of John the Balladeer (sometimes called "Silver John")stories by Manly Wade Wellman that ran for over a dozen years in that magazine. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |