Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,137
edition in the late 1940s: Worse Things Waiting. The Arkham project was a casualty of small-press business conditions at the time and perhaps also a falling out between Manly and Mr. Derleth over whether the latter had anything to teach the former about writing. The Arkham House and Carcosa contents were largely different.
Carcosa and particularly WTW proved extremely frustrating. We were honest but very ignorant; among other things we believed the dates our printer (in Lakemont, Georgia) gave us. We ran a year late.
Others were doubtful about our honesty. The letter from Gerry de la Ree accusing us of being another fan press rip-off was particularly hurtful; but we were, after all, holding his money.
One afternoon I dialed Karl by accident. He’d just talked to the printer and said to me, “I’m frankly suicidal.” I took the afternoon off work and we went to bookstores in Raleigh.
Worse Things Waiting is a wonderful book in every respect. It was probably worth what it cost. But it did cost, all of us and especially Karl.
Things slowly started to work out. Paperback Library did publish Death Angel’s Shadow. The company was bought by Warner Communications and restarted its SF line, including Bloodstone. Karl got a hustling young agent, Kirby McCauley, who instantly improved the terms of the new contract and sold an unwritten Kane novel, Dark Crusade, for $2,000.
The Robert E. Howard boom of the 1970s was getting well under way. Kirby sold to Zebra Books a package of non-Conan REH fiction which included a provision for Karl to write novels about the character Bran MakMorn at $2,500 apiece. Karl was convinced he could write four Bran novels annually; on the strength of that contract he quit his residency after one year.
Writing didn’t go as fast as Karl hoped. The first Bran novel, Legion from the Shadows, was long overdue and the occasion of many calls to Karl by his editor (which didn’t help).
Dark Crusade was later yet, but by 1976 Karl turned it in. Kirby then got Karl a three-book contract from Warners at excellent money for the time: $2,500 for a Kane collection, Night Winds, $4,000 to republish the complete version of his first novel, Darkness Weaves; and $10,000 for a new novel, In the Wake of the Night, which was already begun.
Then Kirby secured one of his brilliant coups: he got Karl a contract to write three Conan novels for Bantam at a base U.S. price of $60,000/book. Karl would only clear $40-45,000 per book of the U.S. money, but there were extensive sales of foreign rights which brought his share well up above the U.S. price.
And that’s when it stopped.
Karl finally managed to turn in one of the three Conan novels, The Road of Kings, in 1978. Karl sent in two-thirds of the novel, claiming it was the whole thing; worked over the weekend and sent in most of the remaining portion, claiming it had been left out of the envelope by mistake; and sent in the last chapter after another all-nighter. Conan Properties, the owner of the rights, canceled the other two (they were assigned to Poul Anderson and Andy Offutt at, I’m told, much less money).
The Road of Kings is a very good novel. It’s the last novel Karl ever wrote. In fact, he made only one more serious attempt at writing a novel: the 22,000-word fragment that appears in the KEW special issue of Weird Tales. All the other novel fragments that Karl published here and there date from before the collapse.
Kirby with his usual brilliance sold a horror novel, The Fourth Seal, to Bantam (for $65,000, with $25,000 on signing) in 1987 without an outline or a word on paper. Karl started the book only to the extent of writing two pages describing the heroine’s lingerie.
I don’t know what happened. I was there the whole time, seeing Karl five or six days a week, and I don’t have a clue.
Karl always claimed he was writing and that the problems were external. Neither statement was true. In the mid-1980s, a number of genuinely bad things happened to him: Manly Wade Wellman, our friend, died; Karl’s wife left him; and his parents had serious health problems. Karl blamed his delays on all those things, but the collapse had come long before. (While I have no use at all for Karl’s ex-wife, she was not primarily responsible for the problems with the marriage nor for its final dissolution.)
Friends who knew Karl in undergraduate and medical school tell me