2014 read #60: After Dark by Manly Wade Wellman.

After Dark by Manly Wade Wellman
184 pages
Published 1980
Read from June 28 to June 29
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Stripped of proper nouns and set dressings, this could almost be a duplicate of the first Silver John novel, The Old Gods Waken. Silver John a-rambles into a new tucked-away bit of the hill country. A gentle, well-read old hillbilly -- instantly impressing John with his practical, sensible, courageous, straightforward, no-nonsense good ol' boy nobility -- offers basement hooch from fruit jars. There's a young woman introduced with a significant talent (folklore and magic lore in Old Gods, guitar pickin' here), but she gets mushy and spends the rest of the book canoodling with a competent, no-nonsense man. That man is relieved that Silver John has a sweetheart far away, and trusts him implicitly now that the shadow of rivalry dries up between them. There's an "unchancy" menace in the hills roundabouts, a race predating the incursion of Native Americans from Asia. The old white man's comfortable hill cabin, and his land, falls under siege as the ancient creatures send down-low, no-good human agents against him, and it's up to Silver John -- and a sidekick who just happens to have knowledge of the creatures they face -- to cast a few counterspells and help the old man out as the ancient menace escalates and comes for him in person in the middle of the night.

Given that scarcely a year separates the two books, that sort of fill-in-the-blanks template is inexcusable. It's not like this is a huge series that exhausted the possibilities of its milieu. It's not like Wellman himself seemed to lack imagination; the tiny hints of Silver John's past adventures all sound more interesting than this, by a long stretch. All the more reason to lament the fact that Suffolk County doesn't have any copies of the Silver John short story omnibus.

I have to give After Dark some credit for its climactic chapter, which had the measured, repeating rhythm of a good ghost story or fairy tale, something I'm always keen on when done well.