Where the Summer Ends - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,2
to the series of pastiches he mostly despised with an exceptional Conan novel, The Road of Kings (1979). He had previously published another pastiche novel, Legion from the Shadows (1976), which featured Howard’s pictish hero Bran Mak Morn.
Karl and Barbara’s visits to Britain had by now become an annual event (and sometimes even more frequent than that). Although they would occasionally catch a train up to Liverpool to see Ramsey Campbell and his family, or down to the seaside town of Whitstable in Kent to visit with me and my girlfriend at the time, Jo Fletcher, most of their trips would usually involve them staying in London, touring pubs and bookshops and hanging out with friends.
Although Karl had trained as a doctor, he always seemed to be recovering from flu or some other illness when we met up at various conventions on both sides of the Atlantic. By now Jo and I had moved in together, and the Wagners were not only frequent visitors to our home, but on occasion we would go down to see them in Chapel Hill after attending a World Fantasy Convention. Unfortunately, their menagerie of cats and dogs inflamed Jo’s allergies, so we found ourselves staying with the Wellmans, who showed us some wonderful hospitality (although we could never convince Frances that we really didn’t care for breakfast grits!).
Both Jo and I celebrated a number of our birthdays precariously perched on the Wagners’ rickety lawn furniture in their back garden. During one of our visits, Karl and Barbara drove us to his native Knoxville, Tennessee, where we sampled the famous barbecue ribs at Bro. Jack’s Place and stayed with Karl’s parents in a four-bedroom cabin they owned on the shores of one of the Tennessee River lakes. Karl took me fishing on the lake one afternoon, although our combined catches would hardly have fed a single person.
Other times, he took us off to meet the widow of writer Richard McKenna or up to pulp dealer Robert Madle’s home in the mountains. I went with Karl and Barbara to see Lucio Fulci’s Zombie at a movie theater in Chapel Hill, and they came with me to see a revival of David Lynch’s Eraserhead in London.
In 1980, Karl took over the editing of the annual Year’s Best Horror Stories anthology series from Gerald W. Page with the eighth volume. For the next fourteen years his incisive selections and knowledgeable introductions helped shape the field of horror fiction.
Karl had also been publishing his own superior stories in the genre— much of it inspired by the work of Robert W. Chambers—in a variety of magazines and anthologies. However, perhaps his finest short story, the British Fantasy Award-winning “Sticks,” was inspired by the regional artwork of Weird Tales illustrator Lee Brown Coye.
In a Lonely Place (1983) collected seven of Karl’s best horror tales, along with an introduction by Peter Straub. Nine more tales appeared in Why Not You and I? (1987), and Author’s Choice Monthly Issue 2: Unthreatened by the Morning Light (1989) contained the novellas “Endless Night,” the British Fantasy Award-winning “Neither Brute Nor Human” and “The River of Night’s Dreaming.”
The Book of Kane (1985) collected five reprint stories featuring his most famous creation, while Killer (1985), a science fiction novel set in Imperial Rome, was written in collaboration with David Drake and based on a 1974 short story.
Returning to his love of heroic fantasy, Karl also edited three Echoes of Valor anthologies (1987, 1989 and 1991), and he went back to his medical roots for the horror anthology Intensive Scare (1990).
By now Karl was at the peak of his profession. He had won the World Fantasy Award in 1983 for his horror novella “Beyond Any Measure,” and was presented with the British Fantasy Special Award that same year.
But then came the dark times. Manly had a bad fall while getting off a tube train in London from which he never fully recovered. He died in 1986. Karl’s father died after a long illness four years later, and by this time Barbara had left him as well. She had always been a “wild spirit,” but in the end even she could no longer put up with Karl’s increasingly heavy drinking, his abrupt mood swings, and living out of suitcases as they traveled from one convention to another.
Barbara moved to Venice, California, and eventually divorced him, and for the next few years Karl went into a black depression when he realized that she was not coming back. During his remaining