Manly Wade Wellman, Jackson, Sunny Valley and Appalachian Gothic

 What started as an exercise for my Witches of Appendix N project has become a rather thorough immersion in the works of Manly Wade Wellman. I have spent more than a couple of months reading his works and listening to his books.  

I went in looking for witches and any number of useful ideas about magic, and to add another piece to the puzzle: the literary landscape behind Dungeons & Dragons.

I did not expect Wellman to start reaching backward into things I had already written.

But here we are.

The more I read Wellman, the more I could see bits of him reflected in two of my own settings, Jackson and Sunny Valley. Some of those similarities are pure coincidence. Others are the result of the same folklore and traditions influencing us from very different directions.

And in at least one case, Wellman handed me an idea that was simply too good not to use.

On the Matter of "Thorne"

Those who have been reading here for a while know Faye Thorne. You might also be aware that this is not, in fact, her real name. She is really "Fiona Voss."

As a child, she was stolen by the Blackthorne Hags and renamed Faye Thorne, to be remade into what I have been calling the "Thorn Child." The Blackthorn Hags took a witch child and tried to turn into a hag.

When I first put together Faye’s character sheet, "Thorne" was just part of the package. But then I came across some Manly Wade Wellman and made the acquaintance of his Rowley Thorne. It was too hard to ignore.

Now, I am inclined to write such things off as happenstance; after all, I had no intention of lifting from Wellman, and there were decades between us when it came to creating these characters. More to the point, when I created Faye Thorne, I had not yet read Wellman. But Faye has a history. The Blackthorne Hags were in the habit of taking children from two families in particular: the Vosses and the Thornes. The Blackthornes were related to the Thornes.

That gave the coincidence some weight. What if the two human families were related?

It led me to do some speculative genealogy. Let us say that Rowley Thorne at some point became involved with a Teutonic witch named Elsa Voss, and they had a son, Arthur Voss. Arthur would have his mother’s name but Rowley’s blood. Fast forward a few years and you have Fiona Voss, who is in every way a Thorne as well as a Voss. 

All of a sudden, the Hags’ fixation on both families is less random. They have been tracking a single bloodline. And the moniker they put on Fiona takes on a different meaning. "Faye Thorne" was never a legal formality. One might say the hags were not giving her a new surname so much as putting an old one back where it belonged. Knowing who she was, they made sure of it. There is something wonderfully unsettling about that.

It gives the whole Thorn Child concept more weight. The hags were not content to simply abduct; they were tending a bloodline like a gardener tends generations of roses, waiting for the right traits to show before they made their claim.

As for whether Rowley Thorne is truly in Fiona’s past, I would rather she (and us) remain in the dark.

There may be a scrawled note from John Thunstone who once looked into the matter of Elsa Voss and Rowley, or an entry in an occult journal, or a family Bible in poor repair. Plausible, certainly. Proof, no. It is very Wellman of it, and suits Fiona.

For Fiona has spent her life spurning the notion that your blood writes your future. The Hags did their worst; gave her a name, taught her the art, ripped out bits of her soul to make her the Thorn Child. She put up with it and lived to tell of it. So even if she were to find Rowley Thorne in her family tree, it would not alter who she is.

Blood will tell you why the monsters want you. It does not account for the person you are. I can see Faye in the mid-90s seeking out an elderly John Thunstone and handling, and not being burned by, his famous silver sword blessed by St. Dunstan. Equally, I can hear Thunstone saying: "The silver knows nothing of surnames."

There is merit in that. Faye is not the sum of her biology. 

There feels something very Wellman about all this. All I needed was a book covered in human flesh and written in blood-red ink telling the Blackthorns what to do and how to do it.

Jackson and Wellman

Jackson is not Appalachia. That needs to be made clear first.

Jackson is a Midwestern town, and the particular flavor of its supernatural landscape developed out of very different sources.

But Jackson and Wellman's fiction share something important: the supernatural has been there all along.

The characters do not discover that magic has suddenly entered their world. They discover that the world they thought they knew was never quite the whole world.

Old stories turn out to have some truth behind them. Things dismissed as superstition prove to have practical value. The person who was considered eccentric because she hung something strange above her door may have had an excellent reason for doing so.

Where Jackson differs is in the reaction.

When the kids in Jackson find out there is something horrible living in the abandoned building, their first instinct is usually to find a flashlight, grab their friends, and go see what it is.

There is an almost heroic recklessness to Jackson. They run toward the darkness.

That is not how Sunny Valley works.

John Thunstone Comes to Jackson

The case can be made that Jackson is precisely the kind of town John Thunstone or Judge Pursuivant would put on their itinerary. I have no trouble imagining an invitation from Illinois Beecher College for John Thunstone to deliver a lecture. On paper it is all very respectable and academic, with a title like “Survivals of European Folk Belief in the American Midwest” or perhaps “Ceremonial Magic and the Persistence of Folklore in Modern America.” To the faculty he is a well-heeled independent scholar with a command of religion and the occult, spending his retirement years on a speaking tour.

But anyone who has read Wellman will know there is more to it than that. Thunstone does not concern himself with these matters as quaint holdovers from a less enlightened time; he studies them because some of them are true. Some of those truths need to be confronted. And that is what makes Jackson such a good fit. 

John Thunstone at Illinois Beecher College

Put him at a lectern in Beecher and he will be talking of witches and old gods and ritual objects and the like. The majority of his audience will think they are in for an entertaining bit of folklore. A few will understand he is being quite literal. Young Larina Nichols will be among them.

I can see her sitting there, this large and urbane man with an air of intimidation describing things she already knows to be fact. She will be listening intently and put in a word here and there. Not your run-of-the-mill questions on symbolism or history. Hers will be a little too precise for comfort.

Thunstone will pick up on it. He may well pause after one of her remarks and fix his gaze on the red-haired girl in the crowd to see that her curiosity is not of the academic sort.

This is Jackson. It is where the supernatural can be put under a microscope. There are the college archives and the libraries, the hospital records and the old newspapers with their forgotten scandals and family histories, and enough people around to spot the impossible when it happens. Judge Pursuivant or Thunstone could come to town and have no end of work.

Of course the local kids would tend to complicate matters. Thunstone might want to spend three days doing his homework on an abandoned house before he so much as steps on the property. By then Candy has already picked the lock, and Larina and her group will have been inside for some time. 

Wellman and Sunny Valley

I can’t help but wonder what bits of synchronicity led me to be listening to Wellman on audiobook while driving through the Appalachian Mountains recently. But even if I hadn’t, the connections abound. Indeed, I found myself driving through some of the very mountains Wellman had talked about and driving to the area of the county Wellman called home.

Sunny Valley has several attributes that are very much in the Wellman Universe.  There is an isolation to this Appalachian community, old mountains all around it, and its own brand of local lore with a tinge of the cosmic at the edges. It leaves you with the sense that those who have put down roots here know things an outsider never will.

The kind of horror one encounters is not some import from a gothic chateau; it is of the land itself.

In that respect, Wellman’s touch is what sets Sunny Valley apart from Jackson. With Jackson, you have a propensity to head straight for trouble. In Sunny Valley, there is an awareness of the things in the hills that are not to be trifled with, and a need to abide by traditions that may seem irrational until they do not, if one is to survive.

Silver John Comes to Sunny Valley

 Silver John would arrive in Sunny Valley very differently.

Nobody invites him. He just comes walking down the road.

Maybe he is looking for a meal and somewhere to sleep. Maybe he plays his guitar at a church social or on somebody's porch. Maybe someone offers him supper because that is what you do when a traveler comes through.

He is there to listen, which is the point of it. Someone will bring up the lights on the ridge, or the cow that has gone dry, or the sound of knocking from under the old bridge once the clock strikes twelve. John does not scoff when an old woman says nobody is foolish enough to take the northern trail after dark. He makes no assumptions that a rule is without meaning just because no one can say why it was made. He asks about it.

Perhaps the old woman can recite the words to a song her grandmother put in her head but has long since lost the melody for. John has the melody. This is how things would work for Sunny Valley.

He is not like Thunstone, who brings his scholarship to bear. John is armed with memory. He does not come with some answer from the outside world; the answer has been here all along, living on in a bit of custom or a rhyme that has eluded everyone else. John is the one to recognize it.

What he does with that knowledge varies. He may fight, or make use of silver, or sing the right song. At times he is wise enough to keep off the mountain.

In time, the folk of Sunny Valley will have only a hazy notion of him. "That fellow with the silver strings," they will say. "Nice enough man. Put up with the Carters for three nights." They might note he was gone the morning the lights on Buckhorn Ridge went out. But then they will be on to other things. The valley has had its share of oddities.

Sunny Valley becomes one more tale in John the Balladeer's story. John is one more strange visitor in Sunny Valley's strange history.

Wellman has given me cause to think again on how music keeps folklore alive. I have come to like this idea from Silver John. Explanations get lost and books burn, but a song endures. A hymn in a hollow will have a verse you won’t find elsewhere; an old fiddle tune can chart a safe way through where one ought not to go at night. The ones singing them don’t know they are holding onto occult knowledge, nor do they need to. The song has preserved it.

People forget. The song remembers.

The Shonokins

Take Wellman's own Shonokins. These "near-human" people are described as descended from another prehistoric hominid lineage, not Homo sapiens. They were in America before the native Americans, likely before homo sapien left Africa. Maybe something that explains the "Uncanny Valley" phenomenon. 

I don’t need to transplant the Shonokins into Sunny Valley, but I do want their effect. It is a world of difference between "there is a monster in that cave" and "something has been living in that cave since before we came along." The first is an encounter. The second is history. And for Sunny Valley, that is a vital distinction. 

Not just a "monster," something that thinks, reasons, and maybe even feels like we do. But they are not a part of the "we." Even a hillbilly with generations of inbreeding is still human. There should be things in the Appalachians that are not even that.

Maybe something like a human-troglodyte, or a grimlock or aglæca. Something really old, living up in those mountains. It looks human, mostly, but isn't.  

Maybe I can dip into that other Appendix N mainstay, the near-human. Not an "ape-man" or even a "sub-human," but an "other-human" or "ur-human." Something that would serve the same ecological niche as the Shonokin or even "the old man of the mountains." But make him less Hillbilly, and more Woodwose or Lovecraftian. Like the fishmen of Innsmouth.

Appalachian Gothic

It brings me back to the notion of Appalachian Gothic. These are geologically old mountains, having seen worlds unrecognizable to us, seas come and go, continents collide. Life has come and gone while they have stood there. A decaying manor or ruined abbey might preserve the sins of the past in traditional Gothic, but here the landscape does the job. The mountain and the woods remember. The creek by your house has likely been on its course since before any human walked the Earth.

That lends the supernatural a quality that is at once folkloric and cosmic. An old woman will tell you not to cross a stream after dark. She may not be able to put a cosmological significance to it, but her grandmother told her and her grandmother’s grandmother knew better. Someone in the line learned the reason. That suffices.

I have taken much from Wellman in this regard. Local horror need not be small. One can be tied to a single valley or family and still be made aware of forces that predate us. Grounding the cosmic in the local only makes it more potent. You cannot leave it behind by heading somewhere far off. This is home.

The Old Rules

There is a particular relationship with tradition in Sunny Valley because of it. You follow rules without question. Don’t whistle in the woods when it is dark. Don’t answer a call from the ridge. Leave the stone. Don’t take the left fork after sunset. An outsider may hear superstition, but a local hears instruction.

Not every one of them is true, and that is more interesting. Some are nonsense, some have been warped by time. But enough of them hold up.

You don’t require an occult order or a secret Vatican library to make sense of it all. No global conspiracy or team of hunters with ledgers on every species is necessary. The fact that the folks in a valley have been doing something odd for two centuries is record enough. Perhaps they had their reasons.

They likely have very good reasons.

Sunday Morning and the Old Ways

There is another Wellman quality I want Sunny Valley to retain: nobody feels obligated to sort every supernatural belief into a neat theological system.

Take the old woman in the front pew come Sunday morning at church. She is as likely to be there as she is to be the one cautioning you against answering if your name is called from the ridge.

She has her faith in Christ and wears a silver cross. You will find iron over the door, and she can rattle off three or four of the charms her grandmother put in her head. At the same time, she harbors no conflict in believing there are things under the mountain that predate man.

An outsider may have a go at putting labels on it: Christian, pagan, superstition, folk magic, Pow-wow. But she would consider such an exercise a waste of time. She knows what is needed for the safety of her family, and that is sufficient.

Jackson Runs Toward It. Sunny Valley Knows Better.

I have said it before.  If I were to put a fine point on the difference between the two settings, it is this: in Jackson the supernatural is a challenge to be met. In Sunny Valley it is simply part of the environment.

The kids in Jackson see an abandoned house and are curious as to what is within. The people in Sunny Valley already know something is in there. They may not be precise about it, but they know enough.

One setting breeds monster hunters, the other survivors. Both have their witches and their old secrets and things that ought not to be. But the approach is fundamentally different. After spending time with Manly Wade Wellman, I am in no doubt as to the nature of that difference. The trip through Appendix N was well worth it for that alone.

The Land Remembers

Wellman has put a finer point on the difference between Jackson and Sunny Valley for me.

In Jackson, it is the events that tend to haunt you. A crime was done, or a bargain struck. Someone died or went missing. The past has a way of intruding on the present when there is unfinished business.

Sunny Valley is haunted in another way, by its very places. No one can tell you what transpired at the old hollow; for all anyone knows, nothing did. Or perhaps it was just always wrong. There are stones left by the creek and an unspoken rule not to climb the western face of the mountain after dark, yet nobody can say who first made that decision or why. The origin is gone, but the custom endures. It is what lends Sunny Valley a particular kind of age. One might say Jackson has history while Sunny Valley has memory, and memory is older than history.

Bringing Wellman Back Around

It would be wrong to think I came up with Jackson or Sunny Valley because I had been reading Manly Wade Wellman. The oddity of it is that both were already in existence before I was even acquainted with his work. What he provided was a vocabulary for my own endeavors.

Plus, I have been talking about both settings for a long time now.

Consider the questions. In Jackson, one wants to know: who did this? What is it, and how do we put a stop to it? Sunny Valley poses entirely different ones: what rules have been left for us here? What will come of it if we are forgetful?

That distinction was there to begin with. Wellman merely helped me to see it. Which is as good an influence as any. Not the kind of writer one sets out to imitate, but the sort who causes you to examine your own work and come to an understanding of why it is the way it is.

And if nothing else? He gave me plenty of good ideas to make these two "80s teen horror" settings more distinct from each other.