Where the Summer Ends - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,4

was shot and he was suffering from congestive heart disease, he apparently died from a burst artery in his stomach.

After I had put the phone down, I cried for an hour. I never got the opportunity to say goodbye.

It was perhaps unfortunate that Robert Bloch had died a couple of weeks earlier. As a result, Karl’s untimely passing was somewhat overshadowed in the genre press by tributes to the veteran author of Psycho.

When his friends were cleaning out Karl’s house after his death, they found an envelope containing three contributor’s copies of The Other Woman, a pornographic novel set in the medical profession and published in 1973. The book was credited to “Kent Allard”—another of Karl’s fictional alter-egos. Nobody knew he’d ever written it.

At the World Fantasy Convention that year we held an impromptu wake for Karl on the Sunday afternoon around the outdoor swimming pool. While we toasted his memory with his favorite Tennessee Whiskey, an editor from a well-known New York publishing house sidled up to me and suggested that now would be a good time to put together a collection of Karl’s short fiction.

It was all I could do to prevent myself from punching him there and then. Instead, before stomping away, I told him that perhaps if they had published a collection of Karl’s fiction while he was still alive, he might have still have been with us.

Karl had told me that he had been thinking about compiling a third original horror collection entitled Exorcisms and Ecstasies, along with a fourth Kane collection called Silver Dagger. So, after I felt enough time had respectfully passed since his death, in 1997 I put together a volume of his uncollected work, along with tributes from friends and colleagues, for independent publisher Fedogan & Bremer.

I of course entitled it Exorcisms and Ecstasies, even though the contents were somewhat different from those that Karl would have chosen, and the section of Kane stories was headed “Silver Dagger.” For the Introduction, I wrote a biographical ghost story with every sentence attributed to Karl taken verbatim from our voluminous correspondence. The book received the 1997 Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Award for superior achievement in a fiction collection.

With Karl’s death, DAW Books ended its annual Year’s Best Horror Stories series after twenty-two volumes. However, the “Kane” books continued to be issued in new editions in France, while in America the novels Bloodstone, Dark Crusade and Darkness Weaves were collected in the omnibus volume Gods in Darkness (2002) by Night Shade Books, who followed it with Midnight Sun (2003), a collection of all the Kane stories. Red Harvest (2002) from the Sidecar Preservation Society contained all the Kane poetry.

At the time of his death, Karl was just a couple of months short of his forty-ninth birthday. That seems ludicrous to me now that I am nearly a decade older than Karl was when he died.

In any sane universe, Karl should still be with us. And, if he was, I have no doubt that he would be properly recognized as an elder statesman of the genre. As a novelist, short story writer, poet, editor, columnist and historian, Karl Edward Wagner excelled in his chosen profession. Even if, arguably, he never reached his full potential, he left behind a superior body of work that will ensure his place in the pantheon of horror and fantasy writers for many decades to come.

This present project from Centipede Press brings together all of Karl’s major short horror stories and novellas. He should still be here to see its publication. I think he would have been proud. I know that I am. But that doesn’t stop me from still missing him...

—Stephen Jones

London, England

January, 2011

Introduction:

Unthreatened by the Morning Light

Inevitably the question is asked of every writer: where do you get your ideas? Best to have some sort of answer written down on a little card, because you’re going to be asked this more than once. Obviously, there is no simple answer beyond the fact that writers find inspiration wherever they can as best they can. Because a story is much more than just an idea, a writer usually cannot pin down a precise source of inspiration. Sometimes it may be some bit of personal experience, sometimes a scrap of dream.

I keep a commonplace book, and I sometimes make notes of my dreams. I rarely experience dreamless sleep, nor do I sleep for more than an hour or so at one stretch. My dreams are vivid, usually have a loosely connected