2014 read #103: The Voice of the Mountain by Manly Wade Wellman.

The Voice of the Mountain by Manly Wade Wellman
179 pages
Published 1984
Read from October 30 to October 31
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Somehow this book, the last Silver John novel, doesn't seem as, well, bad as the others. I'm being unfair, or rather, the last two Silver John books retroactively made me dislike the first two; going back to my original reviews, I find I liked The Old Gods Waken and After Dark just fine, or at least no less than I liked this one. But The Lost and the Lurking was ruined by its ridiculous plot, and The Hanging Stones was such a mess, I must number it among the worst books I've read all year. Together they made me brace for the worst as I prepared to push through one final book to complete the series. Perhaps finding The Voice in the Mountain so unexpectedly painless makes it seem like a better book than it is. (These grades are all arbitrary anyway, so who cares?)

There's still plenty to cringe over here, just not as much as there has been in previous volumes. There's the requisite down-home, sensible, righteous young man (who's totally different from the others in every prior Silver John book, because this one has a beard!), but he disappears after three chapters and doesn't show his face again until the very end, when he's needed for the happy reunion scene. (Which makes it strange that he gets such a detailed and eccentric backstory -- a foundling child named Tombs because he was left in a graveyard -- which never has any relevance to the plot.) There's the mountain village so romanticized it verges on parody, a place of respectable hard-working folks and bright healthy children, the sort of misty-eyed dream a Southern conservative might believe in when idealizing the virtues of Appalachian poverty. There are Wellman's female characters, either wizened old witches, seductive young witches, or rosy-cheeked hill country Madonnas sent from on high to be helpmeets for the requisite down-home young men. There are the pacing issues that have plagued most of these books -- the rising action consists of Silver John sitting in a room, gabbing with the witches, while the villain reads a book in a different room, and occasionally pops in to have a sandwich or to put a movie on his magic window for his guests to enjoy. (I'm not even kidding.)

Yet the worst of Wellman's recurring motifs are blessedly absent. The villain is neither a lost race "here before the Indians" nor an '80s-style Satanist panic, but rather a buckskin version of John Dee that could almost have been an interesting character had he not been written by Wellman in his later years. In fact, the character of Ruel Harpe (for such is the villain's name) goes a long way toward making Voice feel closer to "Walk Like a Mountain," the 1955 story that got me interested in Silver John, than to the rubbish the last couple novels proved to be. Glimpses of creatures from Appalachian folklore also help link Voice to the Old Weird Americana I wished all these books had pursued (even if said creatures are little more than set dressings for the villain's evil mountain fortress). And even if, in the end, John outwits Ruel Harpe by getting him mad enough to lean in close to make a threat, thereby permitting John to snatch away his magic amulet in the corniest climax ever put to paper, well -- fuck it. At least I'm done with these novels now, and maybe -- maybe -- one day I'll care enough to shell out $25 for the collection of Silver John short stories, which might at least be worth reading.