2014 read #99: The Hanging Stones by Manly Wade Wellman.

The Hanging Stones by Manly Wade Wellman
172 pages
Published 1982
Read from October 16 to October 21
Rating: ★½ out of 5

Subtlety has never been a priority in the Silver John novels. Silver John's world is a place of black and white, homespun good and greedy, sniveling evil, where a man can tell at a glance whether a person is a quietly reliable good ol' boy (or gal) or a sneaking no-goodnik, and first impressions are never wrong. It's a place where an elderly but spry paranormal investigator can be named Judge Pursuivant, and the heads of competing New Agey cults can call themselves Lady Sybil and Brother Magnus, and you aren't sure if Wellman is simply being lazy or honestly thinks he's clever. There will almost always be a sensible, hard-working blue collar boy with unexpectedly deep knowledge, and whenever he shows up, he will always get the sensible, no-nonsense girl with the simple winsome ways. There will almost always be muscle employed by the Big Bad, who will get his ass whupped by Silver John and come to immediate, grudging respect for him. In a crisis, the menfolk will plan and fight, and the women will cook up a big country supper. Black folks and Native Americans, when they show up, will be laconic but wise, invariably siding with the good ol' boys against the low-down sneaks, as if to make a point of "I have no problem with the good ones!"

Broadly speaking, it's self-congratulatory conservative American fantasy, tolerable only because I have a soft spot for Appalachian folklore and Old Weird Americana. The Hanging Stones is the second Silver John novel in a row (out of four I've read altogether) that eschews the folklore and the Old Weird altogether, instead retreading the then-timely New Age anxieties Wellman belabored in The Lost and the Lurking, but neglecting the confident pacing and assured storytelling that made that installment almost bearable. A typical Silver John scenario (werewolves as the supernatural threat, no good outsider businessman, good ol' boy and gal working for the baddie but sharing reservations about the whole thing) gets established early on, but Wellman continues piling on extraneous characters and story elements (another outsider businessman, two additional supernatural investigators, an offscreen seance with the "builders of Old Stonehenge," two competing New Agey leaders, John's wife shows up for the first time in four books because someone needs to get kidnapped) for a hundred pages, all too anemic to be considered subplots, having everybody talk and talk and have dinner and repeat the same basic conversation about "New Stonehenge" until he seemingly remembers Silver John novels are pretty damn short and that there were werewolves or something tossed in at the beginning, and maybe it's time to push the plot forward by (inevitably) having John's wife Evadare get kidnapped.

Stones has all the urgency and dynamism of a Burt I. Gordon film -- it would probably be a hell of a lot more readable if a snarky Minnesotan and his robots were there making fun of it over my shoulder. What earns this book my ire is the fact that it is so goddamned tedious. I've been reading the Silver John books because, despite their mediocrity, they're short and somewhat entertaining, breezy little stories I can finish in a day and a half. Stones is short but so boring it ate up four extra days I could have spent reading something better. I only have one more book before I finish the Silver John novels, and I've already gotten it from ILL, but I make a moue at it every time I see it in my library box. After Stones, it would take a hell of a story to get me interested in Silver John's world again.