The Old Gods Waken by Manly Wade Wellman
186 pages
Published 1979
Read from March 2 to March 3
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
This is the first of the Silver John novels, following after a series of short stories; "Walk Like a Mountain," an early favorite in Modern Classics of Fantasy, is the only Silver John story I've read to date, but Suffolk County's 56 public libraries lack any of the Silver John collections, so I'm beginning with this one. It's a comfortable, easygoing slip of a novel, more like a short story stretched to fit a novel's britches. I dig any book or story that treats with Old Weird Americana motifs, but this, sadly, was a bit of a lightweight. The plot is a confused mush of putative North American ape-men (per one of Louis Leakey's wilder late-career claims), Cherokee folklore, and Druids. There's a substantial element of Magical Native American here, but in context of everybody's old magic having real potency to it, I suppose maybe it isn't as patronizing as it could be.
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