Some years after Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John met his true love in the short story “Nine Yard of Other Cloth,” he returned to the series with the novel The Old Gods Waken, with John taking one last wander before settling down with Evadare (read my review of John the Balladeer for details).
Up in the Appalachians, somewhere in North Carolina (it’s very odd hearing the book refer to University of North Carolina and other places now that I’ve been to the campus), John encounters two creepy British expats. It turns out they’re practicing Druids, out to hybridize their magic with ancient pre-Columbian (and, it’s stated, pre-Native American) magic and create something worse. Can John, a pretty folklorist and an old Cherokee sage put a stop to this or will dark magic win the day?
The story is effective, though John’s folksy voice feels strained carrying a story of this length. It’s annoying, however, that the folklorist’s knowledge doesn’t serve anything but exposition — she’s there to be a damsel in distress and a love interest for one of the supporting characters. A bigger problem is the portrayal of druidism as a faith so monstrous even the Romans were horrified — like people who crucified their enemies by the hundreds are the standard for human decency. Then there’s the howler when the Cherokee, Reuben, declares that brutal though it was, the Wounded Knee massacre might have averted Native Americans tapping into some monstrously evil magic — so really, it’s a good thing, don’t you think? No Mr. Wellman, I definitely do not.
At least with William L. Chester’s Kioga books — about a white man raised among the tribes of Nato’wah, the ancestral Arctic homeland of North America’s indigenous population — you know going in you’re getting a white jungle god story so it’s not as surprising as the Wounded Knee reference. In ONE AGAINST THE WILDERNESS we flash back to Kioga’s teenage years: saving a child from human sacrifice, battling schemers and evildoers among the native tribes, surviving deadly peril, discovering his parents’ yacht and in the best story rushing to a grand convocation of tribes before a flood can reach the village and wipe them all out. That story was tense enough to make me appreciate why Kioga’s one of the best Tarzan copies — though if this kind of white savior is not to your taste, avoid the books.
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