Even when he was writing heroic fantasy (he hated the term sword & sorcery). Karl Edward Wagner will probably be best remembered as the creator of the hero-villain Kane, but he always considered himself a horror writer. Horror? Weren’t we talking about heroic fantasy? Well yes. He wouldn’t be on my radar until 2005 or so, when I became seriously interested in the horror genre. We probably passed each other in the hallways and maybe shared an elevator. The heartbreaking thing is, I know that being fellow southerners, he and I attended many of the same conventions in the '80s-'90s. By 1980 I was reading nothing but crime fiction, and by the time I returned to the fantasy fold, around 2000, Wagner had passed away. Howard’s Conan, I had more or less moved away from reading sword & sorcery and heroic fantasy around the time that Wagner’s career in that field was getting up and running in the mid to late 1970s.
This new edition includes all the stories from the original 1983 edition, plus an additional rare tale and the author’s afterword from the Scream/Press limited edition, and features a new introduction by Ramsey Campbell.I discovered Karl Edward Wagner too late.
His seminal volume In a Lonely Place collects eight of his best tales, including “In the Pines,” a classic ghost story evocatively set in the Tennessee woods, “Beyond Any Measure,” an original take on the vampire story, “River of Night’s Dreaming,” a surreal and nightmarish masterpiece inspired by The King in Yellow, and the author’s most famous tale, “Sticks,” a disturbing story thought by many to have been the basis for The Blair Witch Project. Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) has earned a reputation as one of the finest horror writers of the modern era, but his work has been out of print and nearly unobtainable for many years. One of the most important horror collections of modern times, back in print at last! Trade Paperback – Valancourt – Jan 2023 – 268 pages
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