I discovered Karl Edward Wagner too late. Though I grew up reading Robert E. Howard’s Conan, I had more or less moved away from reading sword & sorcery and heroic fantasy around the time that Wagner’s career in that field was getting up and running in the mid to late 1970s. By 1980 I was reading nothing but crime fiction, and by the time I returned to the fantasy fold, around 2000, Wagner had passed away.

The heartbreaking thing is, I know that being fellow southerners, he and I attended many of the same conventions in the '80s-'90s. We probably passed each other in the hallways and maybe shared an elevator. But I wouldn’t have recognized him. He wouldn’t be on my radar until 2005 or so, when I became seriously interested in the horror genre.

Horror? Weren’t we talking about heroic fantasy? Well yes. And no.

Karl Edward Wagner will probably be best remembered as the creator of the hero-villain Kane, but he always considered himself a horror writer. Even when he was writing heroic fantasy (he hated the term sword & sorcery). Karl’s Kane tales were horror at heart. In his essay, “The One and Future Kane,” Wagner says, “I suppose, that if I had to characterize my own approach and orientation, I’d say that I’m more of a horror writer than an action writer.”

This won’t come as a surprise to anyone with a deeper knowledge of Wagner. In addition to writing several volumes worth of horror short stories, he edited fifteen volumes of The Year’s Best Horror for DAW Books. He was a voracious reader, and he sought out horror short stories in strange places, while compiling those anthologies, from genre magazines, fanzines, pro-zines, and from newsstand magazines as diverse as Gallery, Model Railroading, Running Times, and Outlaw Biker.

He also managed to amass a complete collection of the seminal horror/fantasy pulp, Weird Tales. No easy task. The stories in those crumbling magazines would be a major influence on Wagner, who would carve his own path into the same territories as original pulp writers like Hugh B. Cave, E. Hoffman Price, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Manly Wade Wellman.

Several of Wagner’s horror short stories would come to be considered classics. His most often reprinted and anthologized tale is “Sticks,” which is slightly Lovecraftian without being in any way a pastiche. It was reprinted in the influential horror anthology The Dark Descent, and is considered to be an influence on the horror film, The Blair Witch Project, and on the first season of HBO’s True Detective. Weird lattice works, made from sticks tied together, feature in the plots of both of these productions, just as in Wagner’s story.

Two major collections of Wagner’s horror tales were published during his lifetime, Why Not You and I?, and In a Lonely Place. To my mind, In a Lonely Place is probably the stronger of the two, with some of Wagner’s best stories, including “.220 Swift,” “The River of Night’s Dreaming,” “Where the Summer Ends,” and the aforementioned “Sticks.”

A third collection, gathering the rest of Wagner’s horror, Exorcisms and Ecstasies, was published posthumously. There’s some good stuff in there including Wagner’s ‘Weird Westerns’ about Adrian Becker, and stand-alones like the very bleak and personal “But You’ll Never Follow Me.”

Getting back to Kane, I first discovered Karl Edward Wagner through another hero-villain character, Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Menibone. A few years back I was reading through most of the Eternal Champion series, and I had picked up the Elric tribute anthology Tales of the White Wolf, which contained Wagner’s Elric/Kane crossover, “The Gothic Touch.” I didn’t know it at the time, but this would be an important story for me, not only as a reader of horror, but as a writer.

After reading “The Gothic Touch,” I wanted to read more of the Kane stories. Probably because of the 1970s Warner paperback covers by Frank Frazetta, I had gotten the idea that Kane was just another Conan knock-off. The crossover had shown me this was far from the case. Luckily, I already had a few anthologies on my shelves with Kane yarns. I read those and then I tracked down the 2003 Nightshade Books collection, Midnight Sun: The Complete Stories of Kane.

Midnight Sun included an essay by Wagner, “The Once and Future Kane,” which I quoted above. In that essay Wagner describes the origins of Kane, and while he did admit to the influence of Robert E. Howard on the finished product, Wagner had begun writing about Kane long before he read REH. His primary influences had been the Gothic novels of the late 18th -early 19th century.

Wagner read what he termed ‘the standard four’, The Castle of Otranto by Walpole, The Mysteries of Udolpho by Radcliffe, The Monk by Lewis, and Melmoth the Wanderer by Maturin. Of Melmoth, Wagner says, “If I have had to pick the book that shaped Kane into the character he is, it would have to be Melmoth the Wanderer.”

It’s because of Wagner that I ended up reading those same books. You can definitely see the influence of Maturin’s tale of a doomed immortal in the Kane stories. Eternal life often seems more of a curse than a boon for Kane.

As I mentioned earlier, the best Kane stories have horror at their hearts. Probably the most flat-out horrific is “Undertow,” which features a dark, brooding, Gothic atmosphere and a twist at the end that would make The Old Witch from the EC Comics Wagner loved proud. (Hee hee hee!) It also has a sly jab at barbarians with magic swords. If you want to get a feel for Wagner’s Kane yarns, I recommend starting with that one.

Personal favorites include “Mirage,” a very different take on vampires, and “Reflections for the Winter of my Soul,” one of the best werewolf stories ever written. A late favorite is “At First Just Ghostly,” a tale that perhaps includes more autobiography than the author intended, but full of nightmarish images and some terrific prose.

But really, read them all. Karl Edward Wagner was a true talent, able to see the horrors in his own heart and in ours.

Charles R. Rutledge writes scary books and stories, and he reads a lot.