Karl Edward Wagner (1945 – 1994)

On Saturday, the 17th of October -- next weekend -- a meeting of like-minds will be held at the "ancient and notorious" Patrick Sullivan's Saloon at 100 N. Central St. in Knoxville, Tennessee. It will start at 7 p.m. Its purpose? Planning for a Fall Fear and Fantasy Festival in honor of Karl Edward Wagner. (I'd originally posted this as the festival itself, but John Mayer kindly informs me this meeting on the 17th is not to be the Wagner festival proper, but "only a meeting of like-minded fans, family and a few of Karl’s old drinking buddies for the purposes of putting our heads together and bringing about such a festival."

Such an event is loooong overdue. Wagner and his creation Kane were, to my mind, the writer and creation who come closest to Robert E. Howard and Conan the Cimmerian. Not only in intensity and quality of writing, but in the demeanor of the hero himself. (Actually, having thought about it some since I originally posted this, I'll add that Wagner upped the ante quite a bit with Kane, making him a postmodern Conan, for lack of a better term. In a good way, I mean.)

I wish I could go. It would require a car I don't have, or better yet a magic carpet given the distance from here to Knoxville (620 miles). Anyway, if you *can* go, you should.

I probably didn't appreciate Wagner's Kane as much as I should have when he was alive and writing and I was young and first reading s&s; it was all a big mix of excitement to me, Kane and Conan and Thongor and all the others. I was a kid.

Anyway, years later I got heavily into horror, and there again it was in large part because of Wagner. Those volumes he edited of YEAR'S BEST HORROR were some of the best anthologies of the type I've read before or since; Wagner searched high and low for stories, and not just in the usual places. He discovered and championed new writers and brought a flow of life blood to the genre that changed it for the better.

I admit to being one of those people who get into the writers of the tales I enjoy as much as the stories/books themselves, which goes against the theory that the work should stand alone. Along the way I managed to correspond with and/or meet a huge number of my heroes (and they *were* heroes to me, like rock stars) -- Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman, L. Sprague de Camp, Howard Waldrop, Tim Powers, Jim Blaylock, Philip Jose Farmer, George Alec Effinger, Robert Lynn Asprin, Roger Zelazny, Jack Williamson, et. al. And, unlike my experiences with more mainstream literary types (no names here), those guys weren't assholes; in fact, they went out of their way to be kind to a young shy fan who could barely work up the nerve to say hi and who would dance by the mailbox when a letter arrived from one of them.

I never tried to contact or meet Karl Edward Wagner, and I really wish I had. I loved his stuff, Kane as well as the horror stories. When I read the memorial essays for him published in LOCUS when he died, I was entranced and delighted by the person therein described. Except that I couldn't write worth a shit, he reminded me enough of myself that I figured we would get along just fine if we ever did bump paths.

(I remember a description of endless backyard barbecues at his house, and the pile of discarded chicken bones flung into the corner. I don't know why that struck me notably, but I fling a few chicken bones off the porch myself, out here in the woods.)

I digress. So many people have spoken of him so much better than I am doing here now. (Go here, for instance -- www.darkecho.com/darkecho/features/kew.html -- for one such example.) But I am now digging out my tattered old Kane paperbacks now, and trying to track down the ones I don't have, as part of my ongoing Catch Up.

A worthwhile endeavor, I think.

Yes, Wagner partied hard and paid the price for it, dying at the ripe old age of 49. It all seems a part of his "garage band" approach to life, his biker-with-a-typewriter, Hunter Thompson-with-a-sword approach. Sad and iconic, like Robert E. Howard himself.

No way to change the past, but I do wish I'd made a goofy fannish phone call to him, or written a letter, as I was wont to do in those days, just to have the memory of it.

For now, at age 46, all I can do is read the books, and write this, and when I get done here type some more on the new story I have going, and hope one single sentence in it is as good as the sentences in NIGHT WINDS, or DARK CRUSADE, or DARKNESS WEAVES.