“In their castle beyond night
Gather the Gods in Darkness,
With darkness to pattern man's fate.”
— Karl Edward Wagner

Karl Edward Wagner was born on this date seventy-five years ago. By the age of thirty, he was making waves in both the genres of Horror and of Sword and Sorcery. At the time of his untimely death in 1994, he was already a legend.

As I recounted long ago in a blog post for The Cimmerian, I found Karl's fiction first by way of The Legion from the Shadows. I discovered KEW's heroic villain, Kane, soon after in Lin Carter's The Year's Best Fantasy. The story was "Two Suns Setting". Little did I know, at the time, that it and Wagner's classic Kane novel, Dark Crusade, were both nominated for World Fantasy awards in 1977. Karl pretty much owned S&S in 1977.

That said, he'd already made his mark in weird fiction with his "Carcosa" publishing house, which Karl co-founded with David Drake.* It was devoted to getting the works of E. Hoffmann Price and--especially--Manly Wade Wellman into hardcovers. Carcosa won a World Fantasy award in 1976 in honor of its quality work. Wagner and Drake would remain close friends with Wellman for the rest of his life.

The Carcosa logo.

Wagner didn't just publish horror, he wrote it and wrote it well. He won the British Fantasy Award for "Sticks" in 1975. KEW would go on to be nominated for--and sometimes win--numerous other awards for his horror fiction right up until his death. Like Howard, Wellman and Leiber before him, Karl was equally adept at crafting tales of both horror and S&S.

Donald A. Wollheim at DAW Books--who had published works by REH, Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft while all three were still alive--personally chose Wagner to edit DAW's popular and long-running horror anthology, The Year's Best Horror. Karl would eventually edit fifteen volumes of TYBH, his association with it ending only with his death. While an editor at Carcosa, KEW was all about paying tribute to weird fiction masters of the past. With TYBH, Wagner began paying it forward, giving major exposure to many up-and-coming horror authors.

Karl was a historian, practicioner and promulgator of horror/weird literature. He was extremely well-read in the field. As Charles Rutledge pointed out here on the DMR Blog, KEW knew the classics of Gothic Horror and knew them well. Wagner's list of thirty-nine classic horror tales is a challenge to even the most hardcore devotee of the macabre.** As many aficionados of Karl's Sword and Sorcery fiction learned a couple of years ago, his primary literary inspiration was not Robert E. Howard or even Lovecraft. It was Robert W. Chambers, the author of The King in Yellow. The inspiration for the name of Wagner’s publishing house—”Carcosa”—comes straight from Chambers. In Karl Edward Wagner, Darkness found a steady and stalwart champion.

Karl's deep, deep roots in horror are obvious when one reads his tales of Kane. Stories like "Mirage" in Death Angel's Shadow are basically straight-up horror, albeit, in a secondary world setting. “Undertow” is a tale that seems to have roots in both Mary Shelley and pulp horror. The stories of Kane where horror is not a major element are few and far between.

Meanwhile, nowhere within the works of the First Dynasty of Sword and Sorcery can one find such an unrelenting tone of horror and grim darkness. Even Howard's yarns of Bran Mak Morn are lightened somewhat by "Kings of the Night". Moore's tales of Jirel are fairly grim and horrific, but that is ameliorated to a degree. Klarkash-Ton usually worked in a touch of sardonic humor to season his stories of men versus cosmic evil. Leiber almost always provided moments of levity in his tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

Wagner is unrelenting.

It is my understanding that Karl's childhood wasn't particularly joyous. His marriage ended on a less-than-happy note. He appears to have been somewhat disillusioned with the horror field at the time of his death. Wagner's stories later in life certainly seem to be "deeply angry and personal", as one sympathetic reviewer put it.

Whatever the case may be, Karl knew how to bring the black and the red--the horror and the violence--together as few other S&S authors have, before or since.

*From what I can determine, the correct name for the publishing house is simply "Carcosa", not "Carcosa House" or "Carcosa Press".

**One of the classic authors he lists is A. Merritt, whose Dwellers in the Mirage is a very likely candidate as an inspiration for Bloodstone.