<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

audioslave video code sideways the movies masonry videos image measurement video miracles movies tradeshow displays florida new homes tylex drug king rat movie larp video lightning bolt Karl Edward Wagner (b. December 4, 1945 – d. October 13, 1994) was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. He trained as a psychiatrist before becoming a full-time writer and editor. Inspired by the sword and sorcery adventures of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Robert E. Howard’s barbarian hero "Conan the Cimmerian", he set about creating his own fantasy character while still attending medical school. The result was Darkness Weaves With Many Shades (aka Darkness Weaves, 1970), a paperback original published by West Coast porn imprint Powell Publications, featuring the exploits of Kane, the Mystic Swordsman. After publishing a pseudonymous porn novel with a small New York imprint, Wagner relinquished his chance to become a doctor and instead decided to turn to writing full time. Death Angel's Shadow (1973) collected three original Kane novellas, and the author followed it with a new Kane novel, Bloodstone (1975).

In an attempt to expand the popularity of the series, Warner Books commissioned a cover painting by Frank Frazetta. The strategy worked, and Wagner’s writing career took off. His next Kane book was Dark Crusade (1976), which was again graced by another Frazetta cover. Wagner had also been selling his Kane stories and poems regularly various such small press magazines. "Two Suns Setting" sold to the newsstand digest Fantastic Stories (May, 1976). The story won the 1977 British Fantasy Award and was also a World Fantasy Award nominee. Night Winds (1978) was a collection of six previously-published Kane tales. Editors Vern Clark and Bob Berger collected nine Kane verses in Songs of the Damned (1981), a thin chapbook limited to 300 copies. It was published in a revised and expanded version as Red Harvest (2002), edited by Scott F. Wyatt and limited to just 200 copies. The Book of Kane (1985) contained five reprint stories, Gods in Darkness (2002) was an omnibus containing the three Kane novels, and Midnight Sun (2003) was a collection of all the Kane short stories and poetry in one volume.

Fantasy author Roger Zelazny also narrated two audio volumes of Kane stories in 1993. Wagner openly admired the exploits and intrigues of barbarian character Conan, created by Robert Ervin Howard, and he edited three definitive volumes of Howard’s Conan stories: The Hour of the Dragon (1977), The People of the Black Circle (1977) and Red Nails(1977). These titles were subsequently collected in the book club omnibus The Essential Conan (1998). Wagner also added his own contribution to the series of pastiches he mostly despised with an exceptional Conan novel, The Road of Kings (1979). He had previously published another pastiche novel, Legion from the Shadows (1976), which featured Howard’s pictish hero Bran Mak Morn. Killer (1985), a science fiction novel set in Imperial Rome, was written in collaboration with friend David Drake and based on a 1974 short story. Wagner also published his superior horror fiction in In a Lonely Place (1983), Why Not You and I? (1987) and Author's Choice Monthly Issue 2: Unthreatened by the Morning Light (1989). His novella, "Where the Summer Ends" (1980), was published as a separate volume in 1991. Wagner's finest short story, the British Fantasy Award-winning "Sticks" (1974), was inspired by the artwork of Lee Brown Coye (1907-81) and was twice adapted for audio (in 1984 and 1998). His novella “The River of Night's Dreaming” became an episode of the Canadian anthology TV show The Hunger in 1998. The author's own script for Conan III for film producer Dino De Laurentiis remains unproduced. In 1980, Wagner took over the editing of DAW Books' annual Year’s Best Horror Stories with the eighth volume.

For the next fourteen years his incisive selections and knowledgeable introductions helped shape the field of horror fiction. With business partners David Drake and Jim Groce, Wagner also co-founded the World Fantasy Award-winning publishing imprint Carcosa from his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Carcosa published four impressively produced collections of pulp story reprints: Worse Things Waiting by Manly Wade Wellman (1973), Far Lands Other Days by E. Hoffman Price (1975), Murgunstrum and Others by Hugh B.Cave and Lonely Vigils by Wellman (1981).

Wagner also compiled The Valley So Low: Southern Mountain Stories (1987) and John the Balladeer (1988) both by Wellman and Death Stalks the Night (1995) by Cave. Returning to his love of heroic fantasy he also edited three Echoes of Valor anthologies (1987, 1989 and 1991), and Wagner went back to his medical roots for the horror anthology Intensive Scare (1990). He won the World Fantasy Award in 1983 for his horror novella “Beyond Any Measure” and was presented with the British Fantasy Special Award the same year. Unfortunately, years of alcohol abuse resulted in his death from liver failure in 1994. He was just forty-eight years old.

In the Wake of the Night was a proposed fourth Kane novel which, like the second Bran Mak Morn book Queen of the Night, was never actually written. Two other novels, The Fourth Seal (based on his 1975 medical story of the same title) and Tell Me, Dark (based on the 1992 DC Comics graphic novel which he disowned), were also never realized. Exorcisms and Ecstasies, a final volume of uncollected stories, juvenilia and tributes edited by Stephen Jones, appeared in 1997.