Karl Edward Wagner (12 December 1945 – 14 October 1994) was an American writer, poet, editor, and publisher of horror, science fiction, and heroic fantasy, who was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and originally trained as a psychiatrist.
As an editor, he created a three-volume set of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian fiction restored to its original form as written, and edited the long-running and genre-defining The Year's Best Horror Stories series for DAW Books.
His three volumes of Echoes of Valor also featured restored versions of pulp-era fantasy stories by authors such as Fritz Leiber, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, and Nictzin Dyalhis.
Wagner created his own mystical and immortal pre-historical anti-hero, Kane, whose name and background are based on traditional conceptions of the biblical Cain.
A powerful, left-handed warrior-sorcerer with red hair and blue eyes, the character was described by Wagner as one "who could master any situation intellectually, or rip heads off if push came to shove".
The Kane stories are often classified as tales of sword and sorcery (although Wagner disliked the term), which some critics have compared favorably to those of Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock.
[13] Inspired by the sword and sorcery adventures of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and Robert E. Howard's mighty-thewed barbarian Conan the Cimmerian, Wagner set about creating his own fantasy character while still attending medical school.
During 1973, Warner Paperback library published Death Angel's Shadow, which collected the three original Kane tales (one novella, one novelette, and one short story).
Several of his tales were published in Gary Hoppenstand's Midnight Sunn, a magazine initially devoted to Kane and the new school of epic fantasy writers.
A proposed fourth Kane novel, In the Wake of the Night, was never completed, although an excerpt was published as part of a World Fantasy Convention souvenir book of 1981; this also appears in the collection Midnight Sun (2003).
His later stories, such as "But You'll Never Follow Me" and "Silted In", were described by Ramsey Campbell[16] as tormented and deeply personal; some deal explicitly with drug addiction (e.g. "More Sinned Against") and sexual subjects, including psychological repression (e.g. "Brushed Away") and transsexualism (e.g. "Lacunae").
Carcosa Press published four substantial volumes of horror tales: Murgunstrumm and Others by Hugh B. Cave, Far Lands, Other Days by E. Hoffmann Price, Worse Things Waiting and Lonely Vigils, both by Manly Wade Wellman.
A fifth collection was planned, Death Stalks the Night, by Hugh B. Cave; Lee Brown Coye was working on illustrating it when he died, causing Carcosa to abandon the project.
Coye's macabre designs, incorporating mysterious lattices of twigs, were the inspiration for Wagner's British Fantasy Award-winning story "Sticks".
Though he continued to edit, producing three volumes of the heroic fantasy anthology Echoes of Valor for Tor Books during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and published a steady sequence of short stories (most of which were apparently written some years earlier), his most productive time was finished.
[17] In the story "The Gothic Touch", Kane teams up with the albino warrior-sorcerer Elric in a tribute anthology honoring the fiction of Michael Moorcock (Tales of the White Wolf).
[18] Wagner provided the foreword to "Fat Face", a Cthulhu Mythos tale by Michael Shea published as a standalone book by Axolotl Press, 1987.