Thursday, May 8, 2014

from the weird fiction page: Pulpy goodness with a big touch of weird: The Complete John Thunstone, by Manly Wade Wellman

9781893887596
Haffner Press, 2012
646 pp

hardcover


 The Complete John Thunstone turns out to be a gem of a book that kept me happy for days and days while I read through it.  I happen to love pulp fiction, and this is mixed with enough supernatural weirdness to make it well worth what I paid for it, which was quite a bit. The title character,  John Thunstone describes himself as a "truth teller and a truth seeker" whose life's work has been to "seek the nature of reality."  Sometimes "that nature seems to be beyond nature, beyond the nature we know and recognize."  He's also been known as an "explorer of strange occurrences," strange being the operative word.  He is never without his cane, complete with silver blade that was supposedly forged by St. Dunstan and comes in very handy in the most harrowing moments.   His story most fully comes out in What Dreams May Come, a novel included in this collection, and there are clues throughout as to who John Thunstone really is and what he really does.

Here, in The Complete John Thunstone, all of Wellman's John Thunstone's stories have been collected in one volume, and while they're not all spine-tingling extravaganzas, the bottom line for me was that it was pure fun.  Anyone interested can read on at my weird fiction page of this reading journal, located here.  Scoff if you like, but I'd put it up against a lot of what's being released today and it would come out miles ahead. 

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