Karl Edward Wagner (1945–1994)

This 2023 edition of the 1983 collection of Karl Edward Wagner's short horror fiction comes with a brief new introduction by Ramsey Campbell, which references certain sources and influences in addition to recounting personal conversation with the author. The book is a collection of eight of the best stories of its genre to have been written in the second half of the twentieth century.

"In the Pines" is in many respects--and by internal admission--an updating of the 1911 Oliver Onions story "The Beckoning Fair One." It has all of the evil inexorability of Onions' tale with none of its quaint moral circumspection.

"Where the Summer Ends" similarly shows roots in earlier weird fiction, riffing on the Little People of Arthur Machen's stories such as "The Shining Pyramid," but using an American setting familiar to Wagner, and enriched with believable late-20th-century characters.

The epistolary elements of "Sticks" and the character of its conspiracy is very reminiscent of one of my favorite Lovecraft stories, "The Whisperer in Darkness." Its factual basis makes it very eerie indeed!

"The Fourth Seal" is about scientific research and inspired by Wagner's time in medical school, but it is really an incisive and dismaying political parable.

The well-twisted revenge tale "More Sinned Against" is told with understated and economical prose. Like some of the other stories in this collection, though perhaps to a greater degree, it gives unflinching accounts of drug abuse and sexual exploitation.

".220 Swift" returns to the Machenesque in more of a pulp action mode, tying in Robert E. Howard's ideas about Bran Mak Morn and an assortment of other lore. This piece is a very full novella with multiple arcs and resolutions.

"The River of Night's Dreaming" is in the jauniste mode, drawing on the mythemes founded in Robert W. Chambers' The Yellow Sign. It's evidently the only story in which Wagner mined this particular vein, but for my money, the puzzle-box narrative it offers is one of the best examples of the form. It offers a very unreliable viewpoint character whose homicidal madness is perhaps of a piece with a desire to turn back time, even while her memories are inaccessible or impaired, and time itself might be the very river of night's dreaming, which permits only a little swim upstream before the swimmer is exhausted.

The final story "Beyond Any Measure" shares the source for its title with "The River of Night's Dreaming" in the libretto of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. This one concerns reincarnation and combines it in an unexpected way with a supremely traditional sort of gothic horror in a 1980s London setting.

Wagner's own afterword discusses his authorial process and some surprising details about his intent in stories that can be very murky about the "actual" conditions that they are describing and the messages he sought to convey.… (mehr)