Where the Summer Ends - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,3

years he enjoyed relationships with a couple of girlfriends, Louise Stewart and Lynn Gauger, but I believe that he always remained in love with Barbara.

Although he continued to edit anthologies and collections, and publish a steady stream of short stories (most of which were apparently written some years earlier), by the end of the 1980s his most productive period was behind him.

Karl did write a screenplay for a third Conan movie for film producer Dino De Laurentiis, but it was never made. He also compiled three collections that he had originally planned to be published under the Carcosa banner: The Valley So Low: Southern Mountain Stories (1987) and John the Balladeer (1988) both by Manly Wade Wellman, and Death Stalks the Night (1995) by Hugh B. Cave.

In the Fall of 1989, the revived Weird Tales magazine published a “Special Karl Edward Wagner” issue, but it only contained a brief biographical sketch by David Drake and the Kane novella “At First Just Ghostly.”

Karl was a big fan of the cult 1960s television series The Avengers (I can still recall his delight when I gave him a personally inscribed photo of actress Diana Rigg as Emma Peel). In this latter story, he cast his immortal protagonist in the John Steed role, battling seductive demons beneath the streets of London’s Bloomsbury district. He also included both himself and Dennis Etchison in the tale as their fictional counterparts, “Jack Martin” and “Cody Lennox.”

With his debts starting to mount up, Karl’s fragile health also began to suffer, as did his fiction output. He began to miss deadlines, and much-needed contracts were cancelled.

In the Wake of the Night was a proposed fourth Kane novel which, like the second Bran Mak Morn book, Queen of the Night, was much-discussed but never actually written. Two other novels, The Fourth Seal (based on his 1975 medical story of the same title) and Tell Me, Dark (inspired by the 1992 DC Comics graphic novel which he disowned), were also planned but never realized.

In October 19861 had invited Karl, along with fellow authors Dennis Etchison and Charles L. Grant, down to the London location of Clive Barker’s directorial debut, Hellraiser, which I was the unit publicist on. During the Fall of 1991 I was doing the same job on Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, but this time filming was taking place in High Point, North Carolina. At the end of September, Karl and our mutual friend, comics writer John Key Rieber, drove the considerable distance down to the studio to take me and screenwriter Peter Atkins back to David Drake’s birthday party and pig-picking in Chapel Hill. Both Pete and I had a wonderful time that beautiful autumn afternoon, and it also afforded me a chance to visit again with Manly’s widow, Frances.

However, by the time I saw Karl at the 1994 World Horror Convention in Phoenix, Arizona, it was obvious that there was something very seriously wrong with his health. Over the weekend he confided to me that he had suffered a tick bite the previous winter from which he had nearly died. Only his medical training had saved his life when he had recognized the symptoms in time and driven himself to the hospital. It could well be that this was another of Karl’s apocryphal stories.

The last time I saw Karl was at the end of September that same year when he attended the British Fantasy Convention in Birmingham. His eyes and skin were yellow and he looked awful. He told me that the antibiotics he had been taking for the infection from the tick bite were not working. Although Jenny Campbell and I tried to convince him to go to a hospital immediately, he refused and instead decided to return to London early.

I had to fly to eastern Europe the following week to work on another movie, but we talked on the telephone before I left and arranged to meet up a few weeks later at the Old Absinthe House in New Orleans, the city where that year’s World Fantasy Convention was being held.

He never made it. I was in Romania when Jo Fletcher broke the news to me over the phone. Karl had died sometime during the cold, rainy night of October 13 or early the following morning—alone in his bathroom, the bottle of Jack Daniel’s he had been imbibing from close by Years of heavy drinking, possibly coupled with an infection from the tick bite, had finally caused his body to shut down. Although his liver