We’ve all seen those headlines — you know the kind — that run something like, “The best American fantasy writer you’ve never heard of.” Who could that be, we wonder? Well, two possible answers to that particular question are Manly Wade Wellman (1903-1986) and Avram Davidson (1923-1993). It’s a safe bet you haven’t heard of either of them.
Happily, though, these too-little-known but excellent writers — did I mention that both were honored with the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement? — have been supported and championed in recent years by independent publishers and knowledgeable admirers. Let’s start with Wellman.
Back in 2012, Haffner Press assembled “The Complete John Thunstone,” all of Wellman’s stories from Weird Tales magazine about a Manhattan-based occult investigator who, armed with a silver sword-cane, combats demons, the evil magician Rowley Thorne (loosely based on Aleister Crowley) and a hidden race of malignant humanoids called the Shonokins. Fans of Marvel Comics’ Doctor Strange will feel right at home.
This spring, Haffner will top the Thunstone collection with “The Complete John the Balladeer,” edited by Stephen Haffner with illustrations by Tim Kirk. These two hefty hardbacks contain all the marvel-filled adventures of a wandering folk musician whose songs — and silver-stringed guitar — help him thwart modern and ancient evil. The first volume includes the contents of the 1963 Arkham House collection, “Who Fears the Devil?,” as well as five additional stories and two novels, “The Old Gods Waken” and “After Dark.” The second volume comprises a memoir by editor Pat LoBrutto about working with Wellman, three more novels, three stories and Karl Edward Wagner’s 1977 interview with the author at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. This is a set not only worth reading but also worth investing in. For those on a budget, however, Valancourt Books has recently reprinted a paperback of just the John the Balladeer short stories, edited by Wagner and with a foreword by David Drake.
Although most of Wellman’s stories and novels use standard English, this isn’t true for those related in the first person by John the Balladeer (whose last name we never learn). Here’s how the first, “O Ugly Bird!,” begins: “I swear I’m licked before I start, trying to tell you all what Mr. Onselm looked like.”
Initially more than a little hokey-sounding, John’s diction and syntax quickly grow comforting, like a sip of good bourbon. In this initial adventure, an encounter with a backwoods diabolist, the wandering minstrel discovers that his guitar’s silver strings offer some protection against spells and ancient sorcery. As he says: “Won’t a silver bullet kill a witch, or a silver knife a witch’s cat? And a silver key locks out ghosts, doesn’t it?” By the story’s end, though, one of Mr. Onselm’s intended victims concludes that John is more than just a Korean War vet. “‘It was foretold about you in the Bible,’ said Winnie, her voice soft again. ‘There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.’”
The balladeer’s adventures generally bear the same titles as his songs — “Vandy, Vandy,” “Call Me From the Valley,” “The Little Black Train,” “Nine Yards of Other Cloth” — and nearly always conform to the same pattern. In the opening, John happens upon a homestead or gathering of country folk, plays some music, and notices a pretty girl or, in one significant case, a faded beauty with a sinful past: “‘Twenty years back, the height of her bloom,’ said the mouth-harp man, ‘law me, you’d never call to look at anything else.’”
In the midst of the merriment, however, a sinister stranger of some kind invariably appears. Nothing definite happens then, but when John subsequently continues his travels, the woods and hollows start to seem unexpectedly eerie: “Gentlemen, it was lonesome dark and damp going. … And yet, sometimes, it wasn’t as lonesome as you might call for. There were soft noises, like whispers or crawlings; and once there was a howl, not too far away, like a dog, or a man trying to sound like a dog, or maybe the neither of them.”
Inevitably, John and the story’s main female character are threatened by the occult forces at the stranger’s command. When all seems lost, John recalls some lyrics he’d sung earlier and realizes that they show a way to turn the tables on their diabolical adversary.
Despite the similarity in their structure, these tales of mystery and the supernatural excel at evoking the uncanny, even as the myriad details of Southern legend and lore further ramp up the tension and foreboding. Think of them, then, as round-the-campfire stories or front-porch yarns: They are shivery without being gruesome, they move right along, and each will leave you wanting to read just one more.
By contrast, Avram Davidson is far more literary, as well as a master of many vocal registers and genres. In relating his brilliantly gonzo fantasies, he often takes his own sweet time, reveling in pyrotechnic sentences, Jewish slang, mordant humor, digressions and archaic diction. You’ll certainly find all these in “AD 100: 100 Years of Avram Davidson: 100 Unpublished or Uncollected Stories,” edited by Neva Hickman.
Still, to quote Davidson’s godson, Seth Davis, from his introduction to that two-volume set, “If you have never read an Avram Davidson story put this book down immediately and buy a copy of ‘The Avram Davidson Treasury.’ Start there.” First published in 1998, that volume gathers nearly all of the writer’s greatest short works, including — to name only my favorites — “The Golem,” the comic masterpiece “Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper” and “The Slovo Stove.” It is now available again from Or All the Seas With Oysters Publishing, which takes its odd name from Davidson’s best-known story, the one in which we learn that safety pins evolve into coat hangers, which in their turn evolve into bicycles.
“AD 100” is, inevitably, a mixed bag, with mystery and suspense stories predominating. Still, there are five episodes from the life of Vergil Magus, the magician-protagonist of Davidson’s finest novel, “The Phoenix and the Mirror”; as well as a substantial heroic fantasy called “Caravan to Illiel,” which depicts an “Arabian Nights”-like world of swords and sorcery; and the waggish novellas “Bumberboom” and “Basilisk,” which feature the exploits of a smooth operator on a future Earth bombed back into the Dark Ages. Much of the time Mallian speaks with a punctilio that Henry James would admire. Asked for details about a certain plan, he replies:
“To reveal this before an agreement has been reached would perhaps be out of keeping with the traditions of negotiating. I point this out, not from suspicion, fie upon the thought, hem, hem, but simply because I have been traditionally reared and do not desire to cast reflection upon my upbringing by departing therefrom even in trifles.”
Bear in mind that the mock-grandiose represents just one of Davidson’s styles. The mysteries can be hard-boiled and slick, while the essays — in particular “The Wailing of the Gaulish Dead,” which teases out the implications of a line from the Latin poet Claudian — mix conversational ramblings with antiquarian speculation a la Thomas Browne. Just now, practicing a kind of biblio-sortilege, I opened “AD 100” at random, and the first sentence that caught my eye, from “The Captain M. Caper,” was half Raymond Chandler, half S.J. Perelman:
“The premises of Samuel Rice Associates occupied two floors over a chichi barber shop specializing in blond rinses for aging young men and the showroom of a renegade Zoroastrian who sold imitation objets d’art from the Nether Orient.”
You have to smile at that. So, are Manly Wade Wellman and Avram Davidson the two best American fantasy writers you’ve never heard of? Not anymore.
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