Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,136

after I got back (a couple weeks later).

He did. Karl and I became close friends.

Karl had dropped out of medical school after the authorities told him he would have to repeat his third year. His grades were fine, but they didn’t like his attitude. Karl’s parents had been supporting him through med school. They agreed to continue the same level of support through two years of writing full time, with the proviso that if Karl wasn’t self-sufficient by the end of that period he would go back and finish med school.

Powell (a pornography publisher that was trying to break into SF) had contracted to pay $500 for Darkness Weaves and actually paid about $400 before the company went bankrupt. On the strength of that sale, however, Karl had sold to Paperback Library a collection of novellas, Death Angel’s Shadow, and an unwritten novel, Bloodstone. The advance for the collection was $1,200; I think the novel may have been $1,500. That success convinced Karl that he had a real career as a writer.

The first task was to write Bloodstone. He dived into it with enormous energy. All his life Karl did his rough drafts in pencil on a legal pad, edited them in longhand, and then typed up the final copy. I sat on the floor of his bedroom/study proofreading the final pages as they came out of the typewriter. He sent the book off to Paperback Library.

It came back by return mail, unread, with a letter from his editor saying that the house had decided to drop SF. She hoped they would still publish the collection.

Knowing a little more about the business now, I wonder what kind of contract Karl had signed that gave Paperback Library the right to do that with no payment whatever. In any case, a kill fee wouldn’t have made a great deal of difference in the longer term.

For the remainder of 1971 and the following year Karl energetically shopped Bloodstone and began work on other projects. He had a beer downtown with Manly every Wednesday afternoon, and the three of us (with Frances Wellman and my wife Jo) got together regularly for dinner and to read to one another the latest things we’d been writing.

In addition to short fiction about Kane, Karl read the opening to a straight western, Satan’s Gun (an attempt to break into another genre) and the opening chapters of In the Wake of the Night, a Kane novel he’d started before I met him. It was to be over a hundred thousand words long, a very big book for the day.

Nobody bought Bloodstone. One rejection that sticks in my mind was that of Fred Pohl (then at Ace, I believe), who said that he “... couldn’t get a handle on the book.”

Karl sold “In the Pines,” a present-day fantasy novelette written several years before, to F&SF, but the magazine returned his new Kane novelette “The Dark Muse” with copy editor’s markings already on it. The decision against publishing had been made at a very late stage...

Stu Schiff started Whispers, paying a penny a word and probably doing more to keep horror alive in the ’70s than any other single factor. Whispers published some of Karl’s best fiction, including “Sticks”—written for the magazine—but the $81 payment didn’t cover rent and groceries for the time it took Karl to write the story.

Unless you’ve been there yourself you can’t really understand how frustrating all this is. Karl handled it as well as anybody could. He never gave up, but he did have to go back to med school. He graduated after two years and took a residency position (psychiatrists don’t have to intern) as the only psychiatrist at the state mental hospital in Butner who was a native English speaker.

Karl started Carcosa, a small press publishing house, in 1972, in partnership with me and a former roommate of Karl’s named Jim Groce (by then a practicing psychiatrist). It was entirely Karl’s baby, though the initial capital came from Jim and me.

Our original intention was to republish Varney the Vampire, a Victorian penny dreadful which Manly said was available on microfilm from the British Library. We actually got the microfilm—I wonder what happened to it?—but fortunately that was the only money we’d sunk into the project before Arno Press announced their three-volume edition. (Dover later came out with a much more readable text in two volumes.)

Plan B was to publish a collection of Manly’s fantasies under the title Manly had proposed for an Arkham House