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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.131.110.123
Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 05:05 pm:   

Hi - can anyone make his books less expensive for me? He's bloody excellent and I only have two or three stories by him.
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Stephen Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 05:10 pm:   

Now there's a name I used to hear all the time and haven't heard mentioned in years!

I'm sure I read some short stories in my teens but can't for the life of me remember them. He was always mentioned in the same breath as Lovecraft, James, Blackwood, Machen, Hodgson, etc. but seems to have been rather forgotten.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.131.110.123
Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 05:15 pm:   

School for the Unspeakable was the one that used to get me. It had a weirdly pervy undertow. the few i read of him were just so translucently readable and weird.
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Clive (Clive)
Username: Clive

Registered: 10-2009
Posted From: 81.104.165.168
Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 05:21 pm:   

I used to have a couple of the beautiful hardback collections. I think there were five all in all of the complete works. I gave them away as a birthday present though. There was some wonderful stories in them. I've now got a lot of his stuff as e-books though and dip in now and then. The Sherlock Holmes/War of the Worlds mash up that he wrote with his son is great fun.
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Stephen Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 05:26 pm:   

The Collected Stories of Manly Wade Wellman:

The Third Cry to Legba and Other Invocations (2000) (John Thunstone and Lee Cobbett stories)

The Devil is Not Mocked and Other Warnings (2001)

Fearful Rock and Other Precarious Locales (2001) (Judge Pursuivant and Sergeant Jaeger stories)

Sin’s Doorway and Other Ominous Entrances (2003)

Owls Hoot in the Daytime and Other Omens (2003) (John the Balladeer stories)
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Stephen Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 05:27 pm:   

That fourth one sounds fun lol.

Oh to have that on my bookshelf...
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Clive (Clive)
Username: Clive

Registered: 10-2009
Posted From: 81.104.165.168
Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 05:48 pm:   

I had 'The Third Cry to Legba' and 'Owls Hoot in the Daytime'. I imagine they are quite pricey now. I bought them from the, now very sadly no longer with us, Fantasy Centre in London. I've got all the John the Balladeer stories as an ebook. Far from the best way to read them of course.
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Clive (Clive)
Username: Clive

Registered: 10-2009
Posted From: 81.104.165.168
Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 05:52 pm:   

>>I imagine they are quite pricey now<<

Oh, perhaps not. I see a couple on Amazon for £20 ish. That may be my monthly book treat for April then.
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Hubert (Hubert)
Username: Hubert

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 78.22.234.227
Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 07:51 pm:   

I have only read a little Wellman, but "Dhoh" will always be with me. A great story.
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Huw (Huw)
Username: Huw

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 220.138.167.149
Posted on Friday, March 12, 2010 - 02:14 am:   

The Carcosa Press editions of his stories (Lonely Vigils and Worse Things Waiting) are lovely, but expensive, as is the original Arkham edition of Who Fears the Devil?. You can get a paperback edition of all the Silver John stories quite cheaply, though. The best one to go for, in my opinion, is John the Balladeer - it has all the stories in the Arkham edition plus a few more. You can get the Silver John novels in book club editions, if I'm not mistaken, so they're not so expensive.

Like Leiber, Wellman is a writer who deserves to have his work brought to a larger audience. It's about time someone brought out an affordable paperback series of his collected tales.
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Huw (Huw)
Username: Huw

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 220.138.167.149
Posted on Friday, March 12, 2010 - 02:26 am:   

The Night Shade set (5 volumes) that Stephen mentioned above is well worth getting, Tony. They are not as attractive as the Carcosa Press editions, but they are much more affordable: you can get each volume for around $20-25 on ABE (maybe they're even cheaper on Ebay). I've always loved Wellman's stories - they're great fun and always have heart and soul, even at their pulpiest.
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Mick Curtis (Mick)
Username: Mick

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.176.100.26
Posted on Friday, March 12, 2010 - 09:57 am:   

I nearly bought a copy of the Arkham edition of "Who Fears the Devil" at WHC in Toronto the other year - seller wanted about £150 but that was slightly less than the going rate at the time and the book looked as if it was brand new; I'd suspect it'd not been read, almost, which wasn't bad for a book printed in 1963. Didn't buy it 'cos it was a lot of money and regretted it...
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Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus)
Username: Rhysaurus

Registered: 01-2010
Posted From: 212.219.233.223
Posted on Friday, March 12, 2010 - 12:41 pm:   

I bought a cheap paperback edition of John the Balladeer about 15 years ago. Some great stories in that book (in fact I think this volume collects all the 'Silver John' short stories)... Standouts include 'O Ugly Bird', 'One Other', 'The Little Black Train' and (best of all) 'The Desrick on Yandro' which features all the backswoods critters (hidebehind, roperite, gillygaloo etc) in one adventure...

John the Balladeer was a direct influence on my own 'Tin Dylan' stories (which feature a Welsh bard wandering Wales with a harp strung with wires of tin, all the better to preserve the flavour of the old melodies)...
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Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey)
Username: Ramsey

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 195.93.21.74
Posted on Friday, March 12, 2010 - 04:08 pm:   

Try www.abebooks.com, Tony - lowest price first.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 91.110.202.201
Posted on Saturday, March 13, 2010 - 11:31 am:   

Wellman at his best was a great writer of regional American horror. His work from the forties and fifties stands up alongside that of Brennan, Counselman and Derleth, and arguably is more original. I particularly like the John Thunstone stories, including the astonishing 'Shonokin Town'. And one of those stories has the most evocative description of a second-hand bookshop I've ever read.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.27.30.20
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 07:57 am:   

A comment from a non-member I just received:



I’m not trying to get an account, just responding to the thread on the discussion board on Wellman. There’s some of Wellman’s stories online at at Baen Books, http://library.beau.org/lib/ebooks/baen/03/John%20the%20Balladeer/John_the_Balla deer.htm. I’m not very knowledgeable about Wellman, but his tale, “Desrick on Yandro,” made an impression on me when I was a child; it was in the anthology, Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum, (which also included Brenan’s “Slime”), one of my first introductions to horror literature.


Nick Paretsky
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.163.176.9
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 08:05 am:   

Ha! I just read that very story last night having bought that very book last week!
It's a phenomenal piece. I've only known a handful of writers have this effect, that of making you forget you are reading. Thank you for the link, Nick.
For the record i've ordered a brown book of Wellman from amazon, one with a gold pic of Wellman on the front. There's five in all in the series, some about £15, some £150 or so, so I'm starting at the cheap end. Ramsey wrote an intro to one of them; I'd no idea they were friends.
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Huw (Huw)
Username: Huw

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 61.216.49.50
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 11:04 am:   

That sounds like the Night Shade series, Tony! I'm pretty sure you can get most (if not all) of them on ABE for around $20-30 each. You're in for a treat. The Silver John stories are especially good.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.163.176.9
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 11:12 am:   

That story last night - God, we didn't realise what we had back then, did we? we took this eerie poetry so much for granted. I'm not so sure about the layout of these books (the fonts the Americans use feel so dated, so Reader's Digest. And I HATE bright white paper. But still, it's the stories) but I'm looking forward to wading deep into his work.
Sad, though, it strikes me, that a writer as skilled as Wellman should be so buried and forgotten, comparatively, when compared with the likes of Lovecraft. I like Lovecraft but for me I've not quite encountered the same mix of eeriness and humanity - and indeed sense of history, which can often read so heavily in the words of others - of Wellman. I'm glad I've rediscovered him.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.37.199.45
Posted on Friday, March 19, 2010 - 01:20 pm:   

Tony – indeed. It's much easier to gain critical acclaim by writing cold, anti-humanist tracts of polysyllabic cynicism. Weird fiction writers whose work is grounded in human experience, regional settings and colloquial language are routinely dismissed by critics as 'cosy' even when they are nothing of the kind.
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Huw (Huw)
Username: Huw

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 61.216.203.42
Posted on Saturday, March 20, 2010 - 05:34 pm:   

Well said, Joel and Tony. I'm reading Wellman again now, myself. Tony, which Night Shade volume did you go for? Was it Owls Hoot in the Daytime?
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.155.203.110
Posted on Monday, March 22, 2010 - 11:32 am:   

Yeah - it was the cheapest! Odd dicrepancy in the prices - some of the volumes are about a hundred plus quid, others less than 20.
We're like these old guys you see on porches in films (or even in stories themselves), drinking drinks to folk long gone who nobody's heard of.
:-(
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.143.133.88
Posted on Sunday, March 28, 2010 - 11:18 am:   

Sigh. The book came. It's lovely.
Wellman is now up there in my favourite writers camp, with Capote. Every line is beautiful, has something to say, entertains or unnerves. And yet he's so seemingly neglected by the world it's as if I made him up. WTF is wrong with the world? And why do some of us keep writing? - we'll never be as good as this forgotten guy - a page of his is better than all the stuff i've done put together. Ambition, care, desire, are not enough. Some of us will just never, ever have what it takes, and now, the horror is that even if you do - like with Wellman - no-one will notice.

Also am reading this wonderful bio of Philip K Dick. What a guy, and what a lovely book (I'm going through quite a bio streak at the moment, actually - just read the Eels guy's memoirs and they were absolutely astonishing. I read it in two days, something I've not done in decades.).

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