The Hanging Stones by Manly Wade Wellman

His neck was as thin as a carrot, and on it his head looked like a swollen-up pale gourd. His thin legs bowed in at the knee and out at the shank, like two sickles put point to point. Onselm's shoulders didn't wide out as far as his big ears, and they sank and sagged. But a low man is low other ways than in inches, sometimes. He's what folks in the country call a low man, meaning he's short and small. That's a way that love and hate are alike. Onselm and I pure poison hated each other from the start. The way you're purely frozen to death for fit words to tell the favor of the girl you love. I swear I'm licked before I start, trying to tell you all what Mr. Wellman himself has won the prestigious World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. Wellman's non-'Silver John' stories were assembled in the mammoth collection Worse Things Waiting, which won a World Fantasy Award as the Best Anthology/Collection of 1975. In recent years, there were 'Silver John' novels as well: The Old Gods Waken, After Dark, The Lost and the Lurking, The Hanging Stones, and, most recently, Voice of the Mountain.

'O Ugly Bird!' is perhaps the best of the 'Silver John' stories, which have been collected in Who Fears the Devil? -generally perceived as Wellman's best book it was certainly his most influential. He was probably best known for his stories about John the Minstrel or 'Silver John,' scary and vividly evocative tales set against the background of a ghost-and-demon haunted rural Appalachia that, in Wellman's hands, is as bizarre and beautiful as many another writer's entirely imaginary fantasy world. The late Manly Wade Wellman was one of the finest modern practitioners of the 'dark fantasy' or 'supernatural horror' tale. places where time seems to have stood still, good folks keep inside of nights, and the witch and the Hoodoo Man still hold sway. . . . Although we like to compliment ourselves-rather smugly-on the brightness and rationality of our modern world, the Old Ways still exist, and often a drive of only a few hours from the biggest of cities will take you to isolated little hamlets deep in the mountains and woods.

The Hanging Stones by Manly Wade Wellman