Five Horror Short Story Collections That Aren't My Favorites

Horror: (from the OED Online)

A painful emotion compounded of loathing and fear; a shuddering with terror and repugnance; strong aversion mingled with dread; the feeling excited by something shocking or frightful. Also in weaker sense, intense dislike or repugnance. (The prevalent use at all times.)

I strongly believe horror, as a genre, works best at the short story level. I've probably expounded on this before, but, wait, I'm going to again. It's a masterful novel that can maintain the suspense, fear, and atmosphere to deliver a good, unnerving chill to the marrow. Unfortunately, while I've read many very good horror novels (see this post), but, man, oh Manischewitz, I've read way more terrible, or just plain crappy, ones.

On the other hand, I've read great stories from mediocre novelists. Like a nightmare, a story only needs a little time to get in there and drive a spike into your brain or leach poison into your soul. No matter how lunatic the setup is, if it only last a dozen pages, it doesn't have to be able to hold up to deep scrutiny. If you want an evil, winking planet, you can do it ("The Tugging" by Ramsey Campbell). Short fiction is where the horror can run its freest and wildest.

In A Lonely Place (1983) by Karl Edward Wagner

It's been some time since I've read all of this nigh-perfect collection, but enough memories of the best stories in remain so I feel confident in writing about it. Wagner is probably best remembered as an editor of tremendous talent and a writer of topnotch swords & sorcery tales. What he also was, was a very, very good horror writer. If you don't believe me, just look up how many times "Where the Summer Ends" and "Sticks" have been anthologized. Wagner wrote more stories than the seven included in this volume, but these are the ones with which to start.

The Inhabitants of the Lake & Other Less Welcome Tenants (1964) by Ramsey Campbell
What can I say, I love this one, it's an absolute blast. Ramsey Campbell, one of the most respected names in horror, began, as most genre writers do, as a fan. Before he was a teenager, inspired by ghost stories he had read he turned his hand to writing his own. Later, as a teenager, he wrote Cthulhu Mythos tales that strove to be spitting images of HPL's own. At August Derleth's suggestion, Campbell rewrote them in an English setting. In 1964, at the age of eighteen, Arkham House published, Inhabitants, Campbell's first collection.

Replete with creepy, inbred denizens of spiritually corrupt towns, unwholesome tomes, and new Mythos deities of his own devising, these stories are an absolute hoot. Lin Carter tried to do the same thing in his Mythos stories, but they are mostly failures. I think the difference is, ultimately, even at a young age, Campbell was just a better writer and Carter never got that it was atmosphere more than demonic genealogies and lists of tomes that make these sort of stories work. Now, these stories are no great works of art, but Campbell knew for them to work their needed to be discomfiting, to be disturbing. The urban decay and moral rot that's a major part of Campbell's later, non-Mythos, writing can already be found in some of these early stories.


Owls Hoot in the Daytime and Other Omens (2003) by Manly Wade Wellman

This isn't the first and it probably won't be the last collection of Manly Wade Wellman's John the Balladeer stories, but it's the one I have. For those uninitiated to the wondrous magic of Wellman's yarns, these are essentially paranormal detective stories. Instead of fog-shrouded cities, they're set among the deep hollows and mountains of Appalachia and are filled with bits of real (and invented) rural folklore.

I have no memory of when I first encountered Wellman and his stories. It might have been the story "Owls Hoot in the Daytime" itself. It first appeared in Kirby McCauley's terrific anthology, Dark Forces, but I can't swear to it. However I found him, I became a fan years ago and find myself dipping back into his stories regularly. I like them all, but it's the John stories I find drawn back to most often.



Night Shift (1978) by Stephen King

What can I say except that this is the book, more than any other, which made me a lifelong Stephen King fan? I like many of his novels and collections, but the only one other than The Shining that I've read multiple times is this. I've read it maybe half a dozen times over the years, all at once or in bits and pieces. Including "Quitters, Inc.," "The Children of the Corn," and "Night Shift," this collects more of King's truly great stories than any of the other collections published over the years. Vampires, aliens, Lovecraftian horror, King leaves practically no horror stone unturned and it's a blast.

Looking at the table of contents, I was almost shocked at just how many of the stories in Night Shift have been filmed - eleven as standalone or parts of anthology films or tv-miniseries  and several more as non-professional shorts (the latter as part of a deal where King allowed student and amateur directors license stories for a dollar). Most of the films stink, but I'd be curious just how much King has profited from this single forty-one year old story collection. Whatever, if you aren't a King reader but are curious, this is still the best place to start.


Nocturnes (2004) by John Connolly

I discovered John Connolly through the Kevin Costner horror movie, The New Daughter (2009). The movie is not bad, if not great, still some things about it - the inevitability of its conclusion particularly - lodged themselves in my brain and wouldn't let go. When I discovered the movie was based on a story by someone named John Connolly, I decided to get a copy. A quick search brought me to Nocturnes. Since then, I've read nineteen books of Connolly's, seventeen of them part of a series, and not one has disappointed me.


From the King-like "The Cancer Cowboy Rides Again," to the MR James-like "Mr Pettinger's Dæmon," to the supernatural detective novella, "The Reflecting Eye." this book supplies all the chills and shudders I want from horror stories. Nine of the fifteen stories began as a radio scripts and that shows in their ghost-story-around-the-fireplace feel. I wrote a standalone post about the collection when I first found it that you can read HERE. I only describe the stories above as "like" King or James to give you a sense of what they're like. Connolly doesn't hide his influences, but he is not pasticheur. He writes with an authority and eloquence that verges into the poetic many, many times, and its all his own.

The best thing to come out of discovering Connolly was finding his series character, Charlie Parker. Again, I've written about the books HERE. I cannot recommend them enough.

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I could write a dozen posts about another sixty collections I've loved over the decades, but these five are among the very best and among the ones I've gone back to again and again. Not every story in any of them is perfect. Some are even bad, still each of these contains among some of the very best spooky writing from the last half century.

Haunting Short Story Collections

The best horror comes in small doses. Just like that harsh creak in the night becomes some skeletal prowler in our imaginations and just the sound of an old house settling, an author's darkest terror can fade away into nothing when exposed to the harsh light of five hundred pages of storytelling. Restricted to the confines of a ten or forty pages, and that terror will leave you feeling there's something wrong with the universe or something's lurking just outside of your peripheral vision, waiting for you to make a false move. Just think about some of the most famous and best names in horror - Machen, James, Blackwood, and Lovecraft are all known best for their short stories.

As I described in the previous post, horror took a turn toward novels in the seventies that continues to this day. The general turn away from short stories in publishing only accelerated that trend. Today, though, some of the best horror is once again found in short stories. Laird Barron has written a few novels, and they're good. His stories, though, are among the finest, most unsettling weird stories I have ever read.

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The children's librarian at the Stapleton Library, Miss Herz, knew exactly what kids wanted to read. Alongside all the books that we needed for school papers, book reports, or that our parents thought we should read, were Andre Norton, Robert A. Heinlein, and collections of scary stories. There were a bunch of different books, but there's only one I have any memories of: Witches, Witches, Witches, edited by Helen Hoke. I haven't seen a copy of this in years, but I remember it being pretty frightening. If the few interior illustrations I've been able to find it might still provide a little jolt of terror. Unfortunately, other than finding someone posts saying it holds a mix of fairy tales and legends, I have no idea what is actually in the book. I'd like to find out more, because they were some of the very first scary stories I ever read.

There are tons and tons of horror anthologies and single-author collections. Just looking at my e-book library, I've bought a stack of collections over the past few years that I'd never read before. Among them are four collections by Brian Lumley, three collections by Laird Barron (and one top-notch tribute collection inspired by Barron), Voodoo Tales: the Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead, The Dead of Night: The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions, and the monumental The Weird, edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (2012)

This book is a monster - in its effort to explore a century's worth of weird stories, it's 1153 pages long and has 110 stories and novellas. The VanderMeer's goal was to show the evolution of weird fiction over that span. While it includes horror, weird, as they define it, is more than just haunts and ghouls. Looking to the Old Man of Providence, the VanderMeers have this to say:

A 'weird tale', as defined by H.P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writing and given early sanctuary within the pages of magazines like Weird Tales (est. 1923) is a story that has a supernatural element but does not fall into the category of traditional ghost story or Gothic tale, both popular in the 1800s. As Lovecraft wrote in 1927, the weird tale 'has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains'. Instead, it represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane - a 'certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread' or 'malign and particular suspension or defeat of...fixed laws of Nature' through fiction that comes from the more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this, and it sure as heck surprised me. In the early years, there're plenty of classic stories, like HPL's "The Dunwich Horror" and Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows, there's also less genre-bound things like Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" and Jorge Luis Borges' "The Aleph". As the collection progresses down the century, the tendency is towards authors less and less beholden to the pulp tradition, and for want of better terms, more to literary or experimental writing. So, while Laird Barron and T.M Wright are included, so are Ben Okri and Haruki Murakami.

This is an amazing book, and not just because dozens of these authors and stories were completely new to me. The VanderMeers set out to survey the evolution of not a genre, but a style. Recently, Raphael Ordonez wrote: 

"a genre is a dead thing, a pigeonhole in a commercial classification system depending on the presence or absence of various material elements."

That is exactly what The Weird rejects utterly. This book is filled with the scary, the creepy, the mad, and the bizarre. Like the book coming up, this should be part of any horror reader's library.

Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley (1980)

I can't emphasize how important the late and lamented, at least by me, Barrett Book Trader on Staten Island was to me. It opened sometime in the mid-seventies and remained so until the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. In my youth, the only thing I cared about was it great, double-stacked sci-fi and fantasy section. As my tastes widened, I discovered the equally good mystery and literature sections. 

Thinking back, though, my favorite section was the horror section. It was located at the very back of the store, perhaps to keep the folks browsing the romance shelves from coming across the bloody skulls and creepy children on horror covers. I reveled in those stacks of gore-dripping drenched. That's where I discovered Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Hugh B. Cave, and many others. It's also where I discovered a battered and worn copy of Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces.

McCauley was a superstar agent, repping authors like Roger Zelazny, George R.R. Martin, and most significantly here, Stephen King. With Dark Forces, he planned to create an anthology for horror that would possess the "same scope and dynamism" of Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions (1967). The latter was a collection of original speculative fiction stories by a diverse crowd of writers, ranging from old hands like Robert Bloch and Frederik Pohl to up and comers like Larry Niven and Roger Zelazny. 

To achieve that goal, McCauley approached "every living writer who had tried his or her hand at this type of story." Many were unable to respond, by time or a lack of inspiration. In the end, though, he snagged twenty-three contributions from Stephen King, Gene Wolfe, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Robert Aickman, and nineteen other true greats. 

This is a book I love, and I write that while admitting there are some stories in it I have read only once, when I first bought it. On the other hand, Stephen King's "The Mist", T.E.D. Klein's "Children of the Kingdom", and Dennis Etchison's "Night Shift" and Karl Edward Wagner's "Where The Summer Ends" are stories indelibly stained on my brain. Again, if you read horror and have any degree of self respect, you should own this. I myself have a battered old paperback, but discovering the e-book is only $4.99, just bought that too.

Other collections like these worth finding are the late David G. Hartwell's two lengthy genre surveys: The Dark Descent (1987) and Foundations of Fear (1992). Both are excellent, and thick, collections of stories stretching from around the mid-19th century to the late 20th.

Two I want, having only read library copies of once, are the Boris Karloff edited Tales of Terror and And The Darkness Falls. Tales he edited chose and edited himself. According to an essay by David Hartwell, for Darkness, M. Edmund Spears sent Karloff a huge stack of stories to read. Karloff, while on tour with Arsenic and Old Lace, selected sixty-nine. Sure, it's a bit of clever marketing, but these are really good collections.

In A Lonely Place (1983) by Karl Edward Wagner

While Wagner is well known for his Kane swords & sorcery stories, he wrote some of the best horror tales of the last century. If you need proof of that, this is where to go. This single, slim book holds all of Wagner's very best horror stories. Along with the Oliver Onions-inspired "In the Pines," there's the urban terror of "Where the Summer Ends," the Lovecraftian "Sticks," the paranoid of "The Fourth Seal" along with three other great stories.

I bought this at the Manhattan Forbidden Planet during college. I had already read "Where the Summer Ends" in Dark Forces, but I all the rest were totally new to me. Since then, I've probably read this a half dozen times and picked it up and read a story or two at random another half-dozen times.

Wagner is one of the most important figures in 20th horror. As a writer, he was one of the best. As the editor of The Year's Best Horror for DAW for fifteen years, he was as important to the genre as Lin Carter had been for fantasy. According to his forwards, Wagner scoured every pro, semi-pro, and fanzine he could find for each volume's contents. When big novels dominated the field, were a reminder of the power of short stories. Sadly, I lost my copies to basement flooding.

There are too many single author collections to mention them all. From contemporary authors, all of Laird Barron's collections are good, but as it's got the deeply unsettling "The Men from Porlock," I suggest you check out The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (2013) first.

From older authors, Hugh B. Cave's Murgunstrumm and Others (1977) is a must-own. As the magazine market for horror shorts had dried up, by the late sixties Cave had retreated from the field. In the early seventies, Karl Edward Wagner and David Drake established Carcosa Press, and as a labor of love published this massive collection of twenty-six stories. Not only did it remind the world of Cave's existence, it revived his career as a horror writer, and he wrote nearly a dozen novels and dozens of stories between its publications and his death in 2004.

I have a full set of the S.T. Joshi edited, late 80s Arkham House Lovecraft collections. Together, the four books include all of HPL's original stories and revisions he did for others.

There's a special place in my heart, though, for the very first collection of Lovecraft stories I ever read: The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror (1971). It was actually published by Scholastic Books. It's a haphazard mix of good stories ("The Colour Out of Space" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth") and lesser ones ("The Transition of Juan Romero" and "The Festival"), but between nostalgia and the cover, I'm glad to have a copy of this on my shelves.

Stephen King reputation rests on his novels, but he started as a short story writer. His first collection, Night Shift (1978) is chock full of greats (as well as being the source material for several nigh unwatchable films - The Mangler, Children of the Corn, Lawnmower Man, and Maximum Overdrive) that have held up to multiple rereadings. His second collection, Skeleton Crew (1985), is equally good. Later collections are more hit or miss, but never without their gems.

One of the coolest things about the e-book revolution is the availability of free versions of public domain books. Twenty years ago, I searched high and low before I found an overpriced paperback copy. Now, along with Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, and Robert W. Chambers (and many, many others), you can get most of his work for free. Same for the more literary ghost stories of Henry James and Edith Wharton.

That's plenty of stories that should carry you through the Halloween season and beyond. And they don't even scratch the surface. Let me know what collections you find yourself reaching for each year when the temperatures cool down, the leaves turn, and the air fills with the vile smell of manufactured pumpkin spice.

Musical Musings About Kane

   I'm easily distracted when I'm writing.  Now that I have a deadline over at Black Gate that's a serious problem.  Ill discipline is one of my greatest flaws at all times.

   Knowing that, I've stripped the games most obsessing me lately off my home computer.  I'm also forcing myself onto a steady schedule.  Read, write, let the luminous Mrs. V. proof/edit, then rewrite, repeat.  So far so good.

   One problem is, I'm the sort of person who leaves the tv or radio on when I'm reading.  I like some sort of background sensory stimulation.  Too often I find silence more distracting than tv.

    One of the things I do when I write is make a playlist I and let it go.  Which meant for this week's Night Winds article old school Sabbath and non-acoustic Zeppelin (except for "Gallows Pole" which really fit the mood).  Seems sort of obvious now that it's done.  Electric Funeral and When Levee Breaks were part of a perfect soundtrack for Wagner's stories.

   I'm not sure, but I'm thinking Yes for Andre Norton's Three Against the Witch World.  And, yes, I know my choices betray my age.

"Death Angel's Shadow" - Enter Karl Edward Wagner in Red and White

   The last few posts I've written have been meta-musings on swords & sorcery.   "Griots" was largely about the developing field of African American oriented sword & soul.  "Amazons!" and "Sword and Sorceress" were as much about the wider topic of woman-oriented heroic fiction as specific anthologies. Important stuff to the growth and sustenance of what's been viewed as a somewhat restricted genre at times.  Still, I decided it's time to get to some of the stuff that got me hooked and inspired me to start this blog in the first place.

   I've written before that I'm a big fan of Karl Edward Wagner.  His stories and novels about Kane, mystic swordsman, cursed wanderer and utterly blackhearted rogue, were my gateway drug into swords & sorcery.  With a productive writing career hampered by personal problems and then ended by an early death, he only wrote three Kane novels, two collections of short stories and a few other less than essential short stories and bits of ephemera.  All are worth reading but it's in the short stories that Wagner really shined.

   More than any other practitioner of the genre, Wagner crafted stories that work as horror stories as well as S&S.  While there is a brooding, haunted tone to much of Robert E. Howard's stories, in Wagner's it is dominant and ever present.  Howard's S&S  sometimes lurched into horror but with Wagner it was a sustained effort.  Beside the ancient gods, alien races and evil sorceresses that fill the stories, there are werewolves, ghouls, vampires and all sorts of pulpy horror creatures as well.

   Wagner's primary literary love appears to have been horror.  Some of his best and most anthologized writing were his horror stories. His Lovecraftian tale "Sticks" has been reprinted in over a dozen collections since it first appeared in "Whispers" in 1974.  The two collections of his stories, "In a Lonely Place" and "Why Not You And I?" are both important and terrific books.  I've read "Where the Summer Ends" numerous times and it still creeps up and throttles me at the end.

   Beginning in 1980 he took over the reins of editing DAW's "Year's Best Horror".  From then till his death in 1994 he oversaw the creation of fifteen volumes.  He also edited a collection of medical theme horror stories called "Intensive Scares".  Then there's his list of 39 best horror novels.  I've never even heard of some of the authors let alone the books.  His knowledge of the genre was both deep and broad.  In the field of scaring readers the reader the man was all aces.

   Wagner was also a scholar and connoisseur of pulp and heroic fiction.  He brought this knowledge to bear in the creation of the three volumes of "Echoes of Valor".  In them he presented REH and others, often forgotten  or neglected at the time, like Henry Kuttner and Manly Wade Wellman.  Reading his forewords in those books it's clear he had a tremendous knowledge of the old pulp magazines.  He brought that same knowledge and love to trying to get pure, unadulterated Robert E. Howard into print.  In that he  had initial success but was ultimately thwarted by the hand of Sprague de Camp.

   Kane is a cynic's version of the Biblical Cain.  Not a brother jealous of God's love for his younger brother, he is instead the first rebel, a Luciferian liberator set on freeing man from divine dictatorship.  Made, then placed in a domed paradise by an overbearing creator, Kane rose up defiantly.  In the war against his god he murdered that god's favorite creation, Kane's brother.

   In retribution he was cursed with immortality.  Since that time he has roamed the world, sowing chaos where he treads and only able to die by violent means.  Kane is powerfully built man with red hair and beard but his most striking features are his piercing blue eyes, the Mark of Kane, the killer's eyes.  In "Reflections for the Winter of My Soul"  when someone sees Kane: "It was his eyes that bothered Troylin. He had noticed them from the first. It was to be expected, for Kane’s eyes were the eyes of Death! They were blue eyes, but eyes that glowed with their own light. In those cold blue gems blazed the fires of blood madness, of the lust to kill and destroy. They poured forth infinite hatred of life and promised violent ruin to those who sought to meet them. Troylin caught an image of that powerful body striding over a battlefield, killer’s eyes blazing and red sword dealing carnage to all before it."  This is the stuff of which killer dark fantasy is made.

   "Death Angel's Shadow" is a collection of three stories.  In each one Kane is fleeing some catastrophe and seeking sanctuary.  In the first, "Reflections for the Winter of My Soul", it's the destruction of the armies led by the dark priest Orted Ak-Ceddi as chronicled in "Dark Crusade".  The episodes putting Kane to flight in "Cold Light" and "Mirage" are described in just enough detail that you realize there's enough material for the focus of an entire novel.  In "Cold Light" Kane's band of bandits has been destroyed and in "Mirage" he was on the losing side of a royal coup.  One part of Kane's curse seems to be to never find a lasting place of rest and calm but to always be confronted by dark horrors both supernatural and natural.  Sometimes they spring from the many evil deeds of his own past.

   "Reflections for the Winter of My Soul" is a S&S take on the old country house mystery.  The setting is an isolated manor house snowed in and surrounded by dark forests filled with howling wolves.  The story opens with the discovery of a horribly mauled member of Baron Troylin of Carrashal's household.  Before he dies he cries out "Death comes! A man! not a man! Death for all!"  The nobleman decided to winter in his country estate.  Later we discover his reasons for relocating his household for the season are less sanguine than a simple desire to get away from the pressures of court life.

   Red-bearded Kane is first seen fleeing from servants of Ak-Ceddi under the cover of a sudden blizzard.  Kane manages to elude his hunters but is nearly killed by the extreme weather.  Kane realizes the blizzard is unnatural, "a witch storm perhaps, for its abrupt ferocity" hints at sorcery.  Within the storm, something more dangerous than Ak-Ceddi's men is stalking him.  Because smells the "sour smell of damp wolf fur" Kane suspects it is a pack of wolves but the weather's severity makes that unlikely.  Only by chance does he arrive at Baron Troylin's castle and finds its gate unlocked.  By the time Kane's discovered he's nearly frozen to death.

   Soon, like any good mystery we meet the diverse cast, some of whom have hidden motives and secret intentions and all are potential suspects when the deaths start happening.  In addition to Baron Troylin, there is his beautiful daughter, Breenanin.  His son, Henderin, about whom bloody rumors are told, is clearly suffering from some madness.  He demands his meat at dinner be served raw and dripping with blood.  Then there's Lystric, the baron's physician and astrologer, who mistrusts Kane from their first meeting, claiming he should have been killed on sight rather than rescued.  The last player is Troylin's minstrel, Evingolis an albino with an unknown past.

  There are more deaths, ferocious, over-sized wolves, suspicions and accusations.  One of the players lets Kane know he knows much of his long, dark history.  Soon Kane finds himself one of the main suspects.  Before the story's done there is great violence and many bodies littering the castle and its surroundings.
   The next story, "Cold Light", is about inflexible black and white righteousness going up against blackest evil.  After centuries of carrying out his various evil plans Kane finds he's been hunted down by Gaethaa the Avenger.  Gaethaa is a man self forged into a steel hard weapon bent on destroying evil wherever found.  Heir to great wealth he came to despise the "pampered luxury and wasteful existence of his class".  After training he launches and unending war on evil, slaying robbers, wizards, tyrants and monsters.  Gaethaa sees the logical culmination of his quest to destroy evil in killing Kane.  However, there is an element of pride in seeking Kane as well, as he realizes "it will be a magnificent challenge".

   At the opening of "Cold Light" Gaethaa and his men have just finished off the Red Three, ogre brothers who have robbed and eaten the lands around their magically protected keep for years.  Gaethaa orders all survivors whom served the Red Three or faced the cooking pot executed for valuing their own lives above the enslavement and murder of their fellow prisoners.  Gaethaa tells his adjutant, Alidore, "mercy is commendable to be sure, but when you seek to destroy an absolute evil, you must destroy it absolutely."  Driven by such a severe view he seeks to bring justice to Kane for all the evil he's done.

   Several of the men who choose to follow Gaethaa have their reasons to help kill Kane.  One saw his family butchered by a pirates captained by Kane.  His right hand was lopped off by Kane himself.  Another had two of his sisters sacrificed by Kane in a failed sorcerous ritual.  No bones about it, Kane is one dark and twisted soul.

   Kane is met seeking refuge from his latest failed endeavor.  The band of robbers he took command of and led was recently destroyed.  Fleeing, Kane reaches the city of Sebbei.  Once the capital of Demornte, an oasis in the middle of the West Latroxian desert.  Two decades prior to the events of "Cold Light" it was struck by a dire plague that killed most of its citizens.  Now bleached bones litter the countryside.  The few plague survivors have settled in Sebbei where they spend their days with glazed over souls, mired in ennui.

   Rehhaile, a beautiful blind girl with mysterious psychic powers is the only citizen not sunk in to despondency.  Kane's vitality attracts her and she joins him when he sets himself in an abandoned lakeside villa.  As much as he tries to dissuade her she is drawn to "awful need for rest...the unanswerable longing for peace" that exists in him.  Later this allows Gaethaa to use her in his war against Kane.

   Gaethaa's journey to Sebbei is struck by one catastrophe after another.  When his expedition finally arrives only nine men remain.  Nonetheless, Gaethaa's confidence in his success remains unbowed and he boldly announces his intentions to the town's pitiful citizens.  Without hesitation or care, they tell Gaethaa where to find Kane.  The stage for confrontation is set.  In the end it comes down to Gaethaa and a wounded Kane facing each other across sword points: "(t)he men struggled on in silence then, voiceless save for panting breath and animal grunts. Gaethaa was a deadly opponent—a shrewd and skillful swordsman with wiry strength driving his long frame. In addition he was relatively fresh, while Kane was fatigued and bleeding from wounds suffered in recent combat. Still his endurance did not falter before the Avenger’s fanatical attack, nor did the lethal beauty of his swordplay grow strained. Relentlessly the two men slashed and thrust, parried and feinted—each confident that his attack would exhaust the other and soon bring an end to the stalemate".
   The rundown emptied out town, Gaethaa's vicious henchmen and the amoral antagonist at the story's heart all lend a sort of spaghetti western feel to "Cold Light".  It's a tribute to Wagner's talent that Kane possesses a brutal majesty that leaves the reader in his corner in the face of Gaethaa's icy resolve to destroy him.  

   The finale of "Death Angel's Shadow", "Mirage" is a Gothic tale complete with haunted forest, ruined castle and a dark and alluring woman of mystery.  Escaping a failed coup, Kane is severely wounded in an ambush before wandering into the haunted forest surrounding the long abandoned Altbur Keep and its surrounding village.

   As he stumbles through the empty village Kane is attacked by ghouls.  Backed against a wall he makes a final, hopeless stand.  Suddenly a women possessing "strange beauty" appears and drives them away.  Before he collapses into oblivion he hears her cry, "This one shall be mine!"
   Days later, Kane wakes in a bed being ministered to by the steward of a remarkably restored Altbur.  When questioned he tells Kane there were no ghouls only bandits.  

   Asked about the woman he saw the servant tells Kane it was his mistress and the lady of the keep, Naichoryss.  When she is ready she will send for Kane.  When she does we learn a web has already been spun for Kane.  Intrigued by her beauty he steps into it almost willingly even though it surely leads to annihilation.  Even as Kane sinks deeper into Naichoryss' clutches "(h)e even lacked the strength or curiosity to determine whether the door was locked; the possibility of escape simply did not occur to him".
   I wish Wagner didn't have the struggles he did and had been able to write more than he did.  I wish he was still writing new stories as he neared seventy.  Between his own work, his anthologies and promulgation of unedited Robert E. Howard, I believe Wagner was the most important person working in S&S during its renaissance in the sixties and seventies. 

   As much as I love Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock,  their characters often feel like actors playing at S&S.  They got caught up in deconstructing the genre a little too much at times.  Lin Carter was an important editor but at best a poor S&S writer.  
   Those things never happened with Wagner.  Neither are his stories simpleminded and  bad copies of REH.  While he worked in a straight line from Howard, Wagner forged his own bloody literary trail.  The Kane stories are masterpieces of the genre.  Compared to too many much of today's writing these tales are models of economy and pacing.  Gaethaa's journey to the city of Sebbei is a perfect example of this talent.  In only a few paragraphs, Wagner limns an adventure on which many present day writers waste hundreds of narrative choking pages.  Some of his stories are raging beasts capable of sharp, visceral blows and others slither up from behind and smother in darkness.  Ranging from horror to action to dark mysteries they provide some of the best examples of the potential of S&S. 

   The only recent editions of Wagner's Kane stories are the omnibus collections from Night Shade Books.  Used they range from around to way over one hundred bucks.  Fortunately, the old paperbacks from Warner Books are available for under six bucks.  Someone needs to get this stuff back out in reasonably priced mass market editions now.

   

Black Gate - K E Wagner's "Dark Crusade" Review

  As I work on my own piece about the late Karl Edward Wagner and his character, Kane, what comes along in Black Gate but an article about "Dark Crusade".  It's not simply a review but an examination of the why swords and sorcery has been shunted to the sidelines by the doorstopping series that have come to dominate the fantasy market.
  I think the author, Brian Murphy, keys in on several good reasons for S & S's displacement in the marketplace.  The commenters bring up several good additional points.

 
   The Kane novels are good and "Dark Crusade" is the best.  However, for the best of Kane get the short stories.  They're all together in "Midnight Sun" from Night Shade Books.  If that's expensive for you you can get the best in "Death Angel's Shadow" and "Night Winds" for a lot less.  And with classic, if not quite accurate, Frazetta covers.