Kane, and the Problem of Karl Edward Wagner
A psychiatrist who left medicine for fiction, an editor who ran the best horror annual of its era, and a fantasist who wrote the only sword-and-sorcery hero with a genuinely frightening interior life.
Karl Edward Wagner is the writer collectors in this corner of the hobby mention in a slightly lowered voice. He died in 1994 at forty-eight. He left behind a sword-and-sorcery cycle that reads nothing like sword-and-sorcery, two of the finest horror collections of the eighties, a small press that saved a better writer from oblivion, and fifteen volumes of an anthology series that functioned as the field's institutional memory.
Start with Kane, because everyone does. Darkness Weaves came first, in 1970 — cut and retitled by a small West Coast publisher, its restored text not seen until 1978 — and then Death Angel's Shadow, Bloodstone, Dark Crusade and the stories collected as Night Winds. The premise is the biblical Cain rewritten as an immortal red-haired warrior-sorcerer, cursed to wander, and what makes it work is that Wagner refuses to let him be likeable. Kane is intelligent, patient, and genuinely malevolent. The books are structured like heroic fantasy and behave like horror.
The editor's shelf is the one to hunt
From 1980 until his death Wagner edited The Year's Best Horror Stories for DAW — series volumes VIII through XXII. He read everything, including the semi-pro magazines nobody else was reading, and the tables of contents are a running argument about where the interesting work was actually happening. If you want to understand the small-press horror scene of the eighties, those fifteen paperbacks are a better education than any history of it.
He also ran Carcosa, which exists in the record for one overwhelming reason: it put Manly Wade Wellman's pulp fiction back into print when nobody else would.
Then there is the short fiction under his own name. In a Lonely Place and Why Not You and I? collect the work he will ultimately be remembered for. “Sticks” is the famous one — a British Fantasy Award winner whose lashed-branch lattices, drawn from the art of Lee Brown Coye, resurfaced decades later in True Detective. “Beyond Any Measure” took the World Fantasy Award for best novella in 1983. “.220 Swift” is the one that stays with people.
Reading Wagner. The Warner Kane paperbacks surface most often; the Carcosa hardbacks almost never. Kane has since been collected in omnibus editions, so the stories are easier to read than the originals are to own.
What to pay attention to
The Warner paperbacks are the entry point and still reachable, though clean copies with unbroken spines take patience. The Carcosa titles were small print runs and are priced accordingly. The DAW annuals remain the anomaly: to my eye they are still priced like ordinary used paperbacks, and individual volumes turn up in convention bargain boxes, filed under science fiction by people who have not looked at the covers.
Enjoy the mis-shelving while it lasts.