Where the Summer Ends.
Karl Edward Wagner.
Foreword: My Friend Karl.
by Stephen Jones.
When I first met Karl Edward Wagner in 1976, it was almost by accident.
My friend Brian Mooney, from the British Fantasy Society, invited me along to the Tavistock Hotel in London"s Tavistock Square to meet legendary pulp writer Manly Wade Wellman, who was visiting London from his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Now I certainly knew Manly by reputation. He was one of the legendary contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales, and in my mind I equated him with such luminaries as H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Robert Bloch and many others of that era. There was no way that I was going to miss having a drink with one of the giants of the genre!
So, on the appointed evening, we turned up in the tiny hotel bar to find not only Manly and his wife Frances (also a veteran of "The Unique Magazine"), but also their friends Karl and Barbara Wagner, who were fellow residents of the North Carolina university town. Karl and Barbara were much younger than the Wellmans, and to a London boy in his early twenties they still looked like hippies, but everybody quickly bonded over their love of genre fiction and English beer, and lasting friendships were forged that evening.
In fact, it turned out that I had briefly met both couples at a small comics convention the previous year when they had been visiting, but we had not been introduced. As the evening continued and the rounds of bitter kept coming, I found myself talking more with Karl who, it seemed to me, was the driving force of the group. He had organized the vacation and contacted the BFS, and he was incredibly knowledgeable about the kind of fiction that I enjoyed reading.
At the end of a very pleasant evening, as we were saying our reluctant good-byes, Karl and I swapped addresses and he kindly gave both Brian and myself copies of the second issue of Gary Hoppenstand"s small press magazine, Midnight Sun.
Now I had never heard of Karl or the magazine before that evening. So on the tube train home I started reading. It included three stories by Karl-"The Last Wolf," a poignant fragment about the last writer in the world, and two stories featuring his cursed barbarian character Kane: "The Dark Muse" and the second part of a serialization of the unexpurgated Darkness Weaves.
I was already familiar with such heroic fantasy characters as Robert Howard"s Conan the Cimmerian, Michael Moorc.o.c.k"s Elric of Melnibone and Lin Carter"s Thongor of Lemuria but, during that rattling ride beneath the streets of the city, I first encountered an intelligent, brutal and complex character that surpa.s.sed all those sword-wielding heroes whose exploits I had previously read about.
What I didn"t know at that time- mostly because they had not been published in the UK yet-is that while attending medical school, Karl had been inspired by the sword & sorcery adventures of Fritz Leiber"s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Howard"s barbarian hero Conan. He then set about creating his own fantasy character, Kane, the Mystic Swordsman.
Kane was an immortal, flame-haired warrior and sorcerer, loosely based on the Biblical figure, who wandered the Earth selling his sword and his loyalty to the highest bidder.
The first Kane novel, Darkness Weaves With Many Shades..., was a paperback original published in 1970 by West Coast p.o.r.n imprint Powell Publications. Sportinga totally inappropriate cover and heavily edited by some 20,000 words, the book was eventually reissued in a revised edition eight years later under the shortened t.i.tle Darkness Weaves.
Karl had trained as a psychiatrist, but he eventually dropped out of medical school and instead decided to turn to writing fulltime. Death Angel"s Shadow (1973) collected three original Kane novellas, "Reflections for the Winter of My Soul," "Cold Light" and "Mirage." The book was a moderate success, and he followed it with a new Kane novel, Bloodstone (1975).
In an attempt to expand the popularity of the series, Warner Books commissioned a cover painting by the legendary Frank Frazetta, whose artwork a decade before had helped launch the revival of Robert E. Floward"s Conan in paperback. The strategy worked, and Karl"s writing career finally took off.
His next Kane novel was Dark Crusade (1976), which was again graced by another stunning Frazetta cover.
It was not long before I received a letter from Karl telling me how much he had enjoyed the visit, and from that point onwards we kept up a regular and voluminous correspondence that lasted up until his untimely death.
One of the things that we had discussed during that pleasant evening in the Tavistock bar was the World Fantasy Convention.
I had missed the first one the previous year in Providence, Rhode Island, simply because I had known nothing about it until it was too late.
The second gathering was to be held in New York City, and Karl encouraged me to attend. And so it was that over the Halloween weekend of 1976 I found myself for the first time in the United States without my parents, attending The 2nd World Fantasy Convention at the Statler Hilton hotel, on Madison Square Garden, where a single room cost a now-unbelievable $23.00 a night.
Besides the Wagners, the only other person I knew was co-Guest of Honor Michael Moorc.o.c.k from Britain. So Karl made sure he looked after me. He pointed out or introduced me to a host of famous writers and editors, including H. Warner Munn, AndrewJ. Offutt, Fritz Leiber, Christopher Stasheff, Lin Carter, L. Sprague De Camp, Theodore Sturgeon, Frank Belknap Long, Donald and Elsie Wollheim and numerous other luminaries.
I was fortunate to strike up a conversation with another GoH- the renowned SF writer C.L. Moore-at the disappointing $8.50 "Special Awards c.o.c.ktail Buffet," and Karl even got me an invitation to his agent Kirby McCauley"s exclusive champagne party on the Sunday evening. I think it was there that he introduced me to my first taste of Jack Daniel"s Old No. 7 Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey, which has been my drink of choice ever since.
For a young fantasy fan such as myself, it was an unforgettable weekend at which, although I didn"t know it at the time, the seeds of my future life and career were being sown. However, the most memorable event for me took place on my first night in the city, when Karl and Barbara invited me out to a Chinese dinner with a group of their friends. I don"t know how it began-although I believe artist John F. Mayer may have been involved- but no sooner had we stepped outside the hotel when I found myself embroiled in a potential street brawl.
Karl"s group was squaring off against a gang of tough-looking locals, and while the name-calling and pushing went on, he whispered to me to not panic and hold my position-it would all be over in a minute. And he was correct. With some well-chosen expletives, the two groups soon went their separate ways with their individual pride intact. As a result of our encounter, Karl nicknamed me "Streetfighter" Jones, and the diminutive stuck.
The following year the Wagners were back in London with Manly, David A. Drake, Jim Groce and their respective wives.
I think that may have been the first time that I took them to the d.i.c.kens Inn-a picturesque pub dating back to the turn of the 18th century, situated at St Katherine"s Docks on the River Thames. As their visits to London became regular, so did our trips to the d.i.c.kens Inn. (In fact, there is a photo of Manly in 1980 sitting outside the pub on the back jacket of Lonely Vigils. That"s my elbow sneaking into frame on the left.) With Dave and Jim as business partners, Karl had founded the World Fantasy Award-winning publishing imprint Carcosa in 1972. Carcosa produced four beautifully-produced collections of pulp story reprints: Worse Things Waiting by Manly Wade Wellman (1973), Far Lands, Other Days by E. Hoffman Price (1975), Murgunstrum and Others by Hugh B.Cave (1977) and Lonely Vigils, again by Manly (1981).
Meanwhile, Karl"s own writing career was going from strength to strength. He had been regularly selling his Kane stories and poems to various small press magazines, which was a market he vigorously supported throughout his life. "Two Suns Setting," another Kane story, appeared in the May 1976 issue of Fantastic Stories and was selected by Lin Carter for his anthology The Year"s Best Fantasy Stories: 3 (1977). The story won the 1977 British Fantasy Award and was also a World Fantasy Award nominee.
Night Winds (1978) was a collection of six previously-published Kane tales and, around the same time, Warner also reissued all the previous books in the series, each now sporting distinctive Frazetta paintings.
Karl openly admired the exploits and intrigues of the Hyborian Age hero created by Robert E. Howard, and he edited three definitive volumes of the author"s Conan stories: The Flour of the Dragon (1977), The People of the Black Circle (1977) and Red Nails (1977).
He also added his own contribution to the series of pastiches he mostly despised with an exceptional Conan novel, The Road of Kings (1979). He had previously published another pastiche novel, Legion from the Shadows (1976), which featured Howard"s pictish hero Bran Mak Morn.
Karl and Barbara"s visits to Britain had by now become an annual event (and sometimes even more frequent than that). Although they would occasionally catch a train up to Liverpool to see Ramsey Campbell and his family, or down to the seaside town of Whitstable in Kent to visit with me and my girlfriend at the time, Jo Fletcher, most of their trips would usually involve them staying in London, touring pubs and bookshops and hanging out with friends.
Although Karl had trained as a doctor, he always seemed to be recovering from flu or some other illness when we met up at various conventions on both sides of the Atlantic. By now Jo and I had moved in together, and the Wagners were not only frequent visitors to our home, but on occasion we would go down to see them in Chapel Hill after attending a World Fantasy Convention. Unfortunately, their menagerie of cats and dogs inflamed Jo"s allergies, so we found ourselves staying with the Wellmans, who showed us some wonderful hospitality (although we could never convince Frances that we really didn"t care for breakfast grits!).
Both Jo and I celebrated a number of our birthdays precariously perched on the Wagners" rickety lawn furniture in their back garden. During one of our visits, Karl and Barbara drove us to his native Knoxville, Tennessee, where we sampled the famous barbecue ribs at Bro. Jack"s Place and stayed with Karl"s parents in a four-bedroom cabin they owned on the sh.o.r.es of one of the Tennessee River lakes. Karl took me fishing on the lake one afternoon, although our combined catches would hardly have fed a single person.
Other times, he took us off to meet the widow of writer Richard McKenna or up to pulp dealer Robert Madle"s home in the mountains. I went with Karl and Barbara to see Lucio Fulci"s Zombie at a movie theater in Chapel Hill, and they came with me to see a revival of David Lynch"s Eraserhead in London.
In 1980, Karl took over the editing of the annual Year"s Best Horror Stories anthology series from Gerald W. Page with the eighth volume. For the next fourteen years his incisive selections and knowledgeable introductions helped shape the field of horror fiction.
Karl had also been publishing his own superior stories in the genre- much of it inspired by the work of Robert W. Chambers-in a variety of magazines and anthologies. However, perhaps his finest short story, the British Fantasy Award-winning "Sticks," was inspired by the regional artwork of Weird Tales ill.u.s.trator Lee Brown Coye.
In a Lonely Place (1983) collected seven of Karl"s best horror tales, along with an introduction by Peter Straub. Nine more tales appeared in Why Not You and I? (1987), and Author"s Choice Monthly Issue 2: Unthreatened by the Morning Light (1989) contained the novellas "Endless Night," the British Fantasy Award-winning "Neither Brute Nor Human" and "The River of Night"s Dreaming."
The Book of Kane (1985) collected five reprint stories featuring his most famous creation, while Killer (1985), a science fiction novel set in Imperial Rome, was written in collaboration with David Drake and based on a 1974 short story.
Returning to his love of heroic fantasy, Karl also edited three Echoes of Valor anthologies (1987, 1989 and 1991), and he went back to his medical roots for the horror anthology Intensive Scare (1990).
By now Karl was at the peak of his profession. He had won the World Fantasy Award in 1983 for his horror novella "Beyond Any Measure," and was presented with the British Fantasy Special Award that same year.
But then came the dark times. Manly had a bad fall while getting off a tube train in London from which he never fully recovered. He died in 1986. Karl"s father died after a long illness four years later, and by this time Barbara had left him as well. She had always been a "wild spirit," but in the end even she could no longer put up with Karl"s increasingly heavy drinking, his abrupt mood swings, and living out of suitcases as they traveled from one convention to another.
Barbara moved to Venice, California, and eventually divorced him, and for the next few years Karl went into a black depression when he realized that she was not coming back. During his remaining years he enjoyed relationships with a couple of girlfriends, Louise Stewart and Lynn Gauger, but I believe that he always remained in love with Barbara.
Although he continued to edit anthologies and collections, and publish a steady stream of short stories (most of which were apparently written some years earlier), by the end of the 1980s his most productive period was behind him.
Karl did write a screenplay for a third Conan movie for film producer Dino De Laurentiis, but it was never made. He also compiled three collections that he had originally planned to be published under the Carcosa banner: The Valley So Low: Southern Mountain Stories (1987) and John the Balladeer (1988) both by Manly Wade Wellman, and Death Stalks the Night (1995) by Hugh B. Cave.
In the Fall of 1989, the revived Weird Tales magazine published a "Special Karl Edward Wagner" issue, but it only contained a brief biographical sketch by David Drake and the Kane novella "At First Just Ghostly."
Karl was a big fan of the cult 1960s television series The Avengers (I can still recall his delight when I gave him a personally inscribed photo of actress Diana Rigg as Emma Peel). In this latter story, he cast his immortal protagonist in the John Steed role, battling seductive demons beneath the streets of London"s Bloomsbury district. He also included both himself and Dennis Etchison in the tale as their fictional counterparts, "Jack Martin" and "Cody Lennox."
With his debts starting to mount up, Karl"s fragile health also began to suffer, as did his fiction output. He began to miss deadlines, and much-needed contracts were cancelled.
In the Wake of the Night was a proposed fourth Kane novel which, like the second Bran Mak Morn book, Queen of the Night, was much-discussed but never actually written. Two other novels, The Fourth Seal (based on his 1975 medical story of the same t.i.tle) and Tell Me, Dark (inspired by the 1992 DC Comics graphic novel which he disowned), were also planned but never realized.
In October 19861 had invited Karl, along with fellow authors Dennis Etchison and Charles L. Grant, down to the London location of Clive Barker"s directorial debut, h.e.l.lraiser, which I was the unit publicist on. During the Fall of 1991 I was doing the same job on h.e.l.lraiser III: h.e.l.l on Earth, but this time filming was taking place in High Point, North Carolina. At the end of September, Karl and our mutual friend, comics writer John Key Rieber, drove the considerable distance down to the studio to take me and screenwriter Peter Atkins back to David Drake"s birthday party and pig-picking in Chapel Hill. Both Pete and I had a wonderful time that beautiful autumn afternoon, and it also afforded me a chance to visit again with Manly"s widow, Frances.
However, by the time I saw Karl at the 1994 World Horror Convention in Phoenix, Arizona, it was obvious that there was something very seriously wrong with his health. Over the weekend he confided to me that he had suffered a tick bite the previous winter from which he had nearly died. Only his medical training had saved his life when he had recognized the symptoms in time and driven himself to the hospital. It could well be that this was another of Karl"s apocryphal stories.
The last time I saw Karl was at the end of September that same year when he attended the British Fantasy Convention in Birmingham. His eyes and skin were yellow and he looked awful. He told me that the antibiotics he had been taking for the infection from the tick bite were not working. Although Jenny Campbell and I tried to convince him to go to a hospital immediately, he refused and instead decided to return to London early.
I had to fly to eastern Europe the following week to work on another movie, but we talked on the telephone before I left and arranged to meet up a few weeks later at the Old Absinthe House in New Orleans, the city where that year"s World Fantasy Convention was being held.
He never made it. I was in Romania when Jo Fletcher broke the news to me over the phone. Karl had died sometime during the cold, rainy night of October 13 or early the following morning-alone in his bathroom, the bottle of Jack Daniel"s he had been imbibing from close by Years of heavy drinking, possibly coupled with an infection from the tick bite, had finally caused his body to shut down. Although his liver was shot and he was suffering from congestive heart disease, he apparently died from a burst artery in his stomach.
After I had put the phone down, I cried for an hour. I never got the opportunity to say goodbye.
It was perhaps unfortunate that Robert Bloch had died a couple of weeks earlier. As a result, Karl"s untimely pa.s.sing was somewhat overshadowed in the genre press by tributes to the veteran author of Psycho.
When his friends were cleaning out Karl"s house after his death, they found an envelope containing three contributor"s copies of The Other Woman, a p.o.r.nographic novel set in the medical profession and published in 1973. The book was credited to "Kent Allard"-another of Karl"s fictional alter-egos. n.o.body knew he"d ever written it.
At the World Fantasy Convention that year we held an impromptu wake for Karl on the Sunday afternoon around the outdoor swimming pool. While we toasted his memory with his favorite Tennessee Whiskey, an editor from a well-known New York publishing house sidled up to me and suggested that now would be a good time to put together a collection of Karl"s short fiction.
It was all I could do to prevent myself from punching him there and then. Instead, before stomping away, I told him that perhaps if they had published a collection of Karl"s fiction while he was still alive, he might have still have been with us.
Karl had told me that he had been thinking about compiling a third original horror collection ent.i.tled Exorcisms and Ecstasies, along with a fourth Kane collection called Silver Dagger. So, after I felt enough time had respectfully pa.s.sed since his death, in 1997 I put together a volume of his uncollected work, along with tributes from friends and colleagues, for independent publisher Fedogan & Bremer.
I of course ent.i.tled it Exorcisms and Ecstasies, even though the contents were somewhat different from those that Karl would have chosen, and the section of Kane stories was headed "Silver Dagger." For the Introduction, I wrote a biographical ghost story with every sentence attributed to Karl taken verbatim from our voluminous correspondence. The book received the 1997 Horror Writers a.s.sociation Bram Stoker Award for superior achievement in a fiction collection.
With Karl"s death, DAW Books ended its annual Year"s Best Horror Stories series after twenty-two volumes. However, the "Kane" books continued to be issued in new editions in France, while in America the novels Bloodstone, Dark Crusade and Darkness Weaves were collected in the omnibus volume G.o.ds in Darkness (2002) by Night Shade Books, who followed it with Midnight Sun (2003), a collection of all the Kane stories. Red Harvest (2002) from the Sidecar Preservation Society contained all the Kane poetry.
At the time of his death, Karl was just a couple of months short of his forty-ninth birthday. That seems ludicrous to me now that I am nearly a decade older than Karl was when he died.
In any sane universe, Karl should still be with us. And, if he was, I have no doubt that he would be properly recognized as an elder statesman of the genre. As a novelist, short story writer, poet, editor, columnist and historian, Karl Edward Wagner excelled in his chosen profession. Even if, arguably, he never reached his full potential, he left behind a superior body of work that will ensure his place in the pantheon of horror and fantasy writers for many decades to come.
This present project from Centipede Press brings together all of Karl"s major short horror stories and novellas. He should still be here to see its publication. I think he would have been proud. I know that I am. But that doesn"t stop me from still missing him...
-Stephen Jones.
London, England.
January, 2011.
Introduction:.
Unthreatened by the Morning Light.
Inevitably the question is asked of every writer: where do you get your ideas? Best to have some sort of answer written down on a little card, because you"re going to be asked this more than once. Obviously, there is no simple answer beyond the fact that writers find inspiration wherever they can as best they can. Because a story is much more than just an idea, a writer usually cannot pin down a precise source of inspiration. Sometimes it may be some bit of personal experience, sometimes a sc.r.a.p of dream.
I keep a commonplace book, and I sometimes make notes of my dreams. I rarely experience dreamless sleep, nor do I sleep for more than an hour or so at one stretch. My dreams are vivid, usually have a loosely connected narrative flow, and are perceived in color. Often I feel physical pain when my viewpoint persona is injured. So much for "Pinch me; I must be dreaming."
No pain without gain. At times a dream seems worth holding. Stumble out of bed and into my study, jot something down in my commonplace book.
Sure, there are many other sources of "ideas," but three stories presented here are all born of dream.
"Endless Night" is virtually a succession of dream sequences. Its visions are directly from my dreams, and most of the segments are recurrent dreams. It"s rather an odd feeling to recognize specific locales within one"s dream, all the while being aware within the dream that this is a remembrance of previous dreams, and to retain that place memory upon awakening. I am left with permanent memories of places I have never been, never actually seen, but only return to in dream. The challenge to me was to weave a possible framework into which these recurrent dream patterns might be a.s.sembled. Since doing so, I have not revisited these places. "Endless Night" was written for The Architecture of Fear, edited by Kathryn Cramer and Peter D. Pautz. Cramer is currently editing a follow-up anthology, for which I am writing another story, "Cedar Lane," similarly based upon recurrent dreams. I pray for a similar exorcism.
"Neither Brute Nor Human" concludes with a dream sequence which I recorded in my commonplace book during the early hours of February 25, 1982. The character, Trevor Nordgren, was a specific real-life author who appeared in my dream. I took pains to blur his ident.i.ty and incorporate his imaginary career with bits from other authors" experiences. To date, only one reader has correctly guessed the ident.i.ty of the writer whom I saw in my dream.
The task here was to build a story to support the dream-envisioned concluding sequence. Here, real life filled in. Much of this novelette is anecdotal, recounting actual experiences-sometimes not as thinly veiled- of myself and several other writers. There is more than a little self-parody in the character Damon Harrington, and there is as much bitterness as there are in-jokes regarding the entire writing business. I a.s.sume readers are sufficiently familiar with the works of Edgar Allan Poe to recall the line which follows that excerpted for the story"s t.i.tle. The novelette was written for the 1985 World Fantasy Convention program book-guaranteeing it novelty status. Nonetheless, "Neither Brute Nor Human" won the 1983 British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction.
"The River of Night"s Dreaming" presented an opposite challenge. This time the dream came to me as an almost complete narrative, becoming increasingly fragmented and disturbing as it progressed. The first quarter of the novella is virtually as I dreamed it; the remaining had to be worked into a narrative pattern from the fragments. My commonplace book notes this as a dream during the early morning hours of June 30, 1979-ten years ago almost to the day as I write this Introduction. Its memory remains as vivid as if I had actually been there. Perhaps...
I perceived the dream as if I were watching a story unfold, and as I dreamed it I thought that its t.i.tle was "The Tapping at the Window." Fans of The Rocky Horror Show will recognize the actual t.i.tle as taken from my friend Richard O"Brien"s lyrics. There is obviously more than a touch of Freud and Giger here as well, but the most profound motif derives from the works of Robert W. Chambers, best remembered for his fin de siecle masterpiece, The King in Yellow. Chambers has been regarded as a writer who set up a deliberate barrier to final comprehension in his finest horror stories-and this is the stuff that nightmares are made of. "The River of Night"s Dreaming" was written for Charles L. Grant"s Shadows series, but was rejected by Grant as being too s.e.xually explicit. Fearless editor Stuart David Schiff then accepted it for his rival Whispers series. The novella managed to edge in as one of the World Fantasy Award also-rans.
Of course, not every dream noted in my commonplace book evolves into a story. Some visions are too elusive by daylight, some ideas are just plain silly. I"m still puzzled by one enigmatic dream entry-a single word: nematodes.
-Karl Edward Wagner.
Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
July, 1989.
In the Pines.
There is an atmosphere of inutterable loneliness that haunts any ruin-a feeling particularly evident in those places once given over to the lighter emotions. Wander over the littered grounds of an abandoned amus.e.m.e.nt park and feel the overwhelming presence of desolation. Flimsy booths with awnings tattered in the wind, rotting heaps of sun-bleached papier mache. Crumbling timbers of a roller coaster thrust upward through the jungle of weeds and debris-like ribs of some t.i.tanic unburied skeleton. The wind blows colder there; the sun seems dimmer. Ghosts of laughter, lost strains of raucous music can almost be heard. Speak, and your voice sounds strangely loud-and yet curiously smothered.
Or tour a neglected formal garden, with its termite-riddled arbors and gazebo. The lily pond is drained, choked with weeks and refuse. Only a few flowers and shrubs poke miserably through the rank undergrowth. Dense clots of weeds and vines overrun the paths and statuary. Here and there a shrub or rambling rose has grown into a wild, misshapen tangle. The flowers offer anemic blooms, where no hand gathers, no eye admires. No birds sing in that uncanny hush.
Such places are lairs of inconsolable gloom. After the brighter spirits have departed, shadows of despair and oppression a.s.sume their place. The area has been drained of its ability to support any further light emotion, and now, like weeds on eroded soil, only the darker sentiments can take root and flourish. These places are best left to the loneliness of their grief...
*I*