narrative flow, and are perceived in color. Often I feel physical pain when my viewpoint persona is injured. So much for “Pinch me; I must be dreaming.”
No pain without gain. At times a dream seems worth holding. Stumble out of bed and into my study, jot something down in my commonplace book.
Sure, there are many other sources of “ideas,” but three stories presented here are all born of dream.
“Endless Night” is virtually a succession of dream sequences. Its visions are directly from my dreams, and most of the segments are recurrent dreams. It’s rather an odd feeling to recognize specific locales within one’s dream, all the while being aware within the dream that this is a remembrance of previous dreams, and to retain that place memory upon awakening. I am left with permanent memories of places I have never been, never actually seen, but only return to in dream. The challenge to me was to weave a possible framework into which these recurrent dream patterns might be assembled. Since doing so, I have not revisited these places. “Endless Night” was written for The Architecture of Fear, edited by Kathryn Cramer and Peter D. Pautz. Cramer is currently editing a follow-up anthology, for which I am writing another story, “Cedar Lane,” similarly based upon recurrent dreams. I pray for a similar exorcism.
“Neither Brute Nor Human” concludes with a dream sequence which I recorded in my commonplace book during the early hours of February 25, 1982. The character, Trevor Nordgren, was a specific real-life author who appeared in my dream. I took pains to blur his identity and incorporate his imaginary career with bits from other authors’ experiences. To date, only one reader has correctly guessed the identity of the writer whom I saw in my dream.
The task here was to build a story to support the dream-envisioned concluding sequence. Here, real life filled in. Much of this novelette is anecdotal, recounting actual experiences—sometimes not as thinly veiled— of myself and several other writers. There is more than a little self-parody in the character Damon Harrington, and there is as much bitterness as there are in-jokes regarding the entire writing business. I assume readers are sufficiently familiar with the works of Edgar Allan Poe to recall the line which follows that excerpted for the story’s title. The novelette was written for the 1985 World Fantasy Convention program book—guaranteeing it novelty status. Nonetheless, “Neither Brute Nor Human” won the 1983 British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction.
“The River of Night’s Dreaming” presented an opposite challenge. This time the dream came to me as an almost complete narrative, becoming increasingly fragmented and disturbing as it progressed. The first quarter of the novella is virtually as I dreamed it; the remaining had to be worked into a narrative pattern from the fragments. My commonplace book notes this as a dream during the early morning hours of June 30, 1979—ten years ago almost to the day as I write this Introduction. Its memory remains as vivid as if I had actually been there. Perhaps...
I perceived the dream as if I were watching a story unfold, and as I dreamed it I thought that its title was “The Tapping at the Window.” Fans of The Rocky Horror Show will recognize the actual title as taken from my friend Richard O’Brien’s lyrics. There is obviously more than a touch of Freud and Giger here as well, but the most profound motif derives from the works of Robert W. Chambers, best remembered for his fin de siècle masterpiece, The King in Yellow. Chambers has been regarded as a writer who set up a deliberate barrier to final comprehension in his finest horror stories—and this is the stuff that nightmares are made of. “The River of Night’s Dreaming” was written for Charles L. Grant’s Shadows series, but was rejected by Grant as being too sexually explicit. Fearless editor Stuart David Schiff then accepted it for his rival Whispers series. The novella managed to edge in as one of the World Fantasy Award also-rans.
Of course, not every dream noted in my commonplace book evolves into a story. Some visions are too elusive by daylight, some ideas are just plain silly. I’m still puzzled by one enigmatic dream entry—a single word: nematodes.
—Karl Edward Wagner
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
July, 1989
In the Pines
There is an atmosphere of inutterable loneliness that haunts any ruin—a feeling particularly evident in those places once given over to the lighter emotions. Wander over the littered grounds of an abandoned amusement