In the Gothic novel, there really isn’t a hero, certainly not in the modern sense of the hero in fiction. The hero-villain is the chief protagonist, and while he’s portrayed as a person who is admir­able for his heroic qualities (that’s heroic in the grand scale sense, not the dime novel sense), on the other hand, he’s an evil person, in the sense of Christian morality, at any rate, Kane is that sort of character.

I was interested in the Gothic novel. I liked them because they were excellent horror novels, and they were written in a sort of imaginary medieval world setting. I see myself more as a writer of horror stories than I do as a heroic fantasy writer. What I wanted to do with Kane was to write Gothic horror stories.

It seems today that in order to be known as a horror writer, you must always set your stories in small New England towns, or Cali­fornia towns, or New York City. You have your typical American family enmeshed in strange, shadowy horrors, nightmares, witchcraft, and stuff. That’s been done well and poorly, but it’s certainly been done enough.

In  Death Angel’s Shadow , I used Gothic vampires and werewolves in an epic fantasy story. At the time, I  thought it hadn’t been one. As it turned out, it had been done in century by Creenbough and later by Crockett. but I didn’t know that until years later. Instead of writing a were­wolf story that was set in Los Angeles, I wrote a werewolf story in a heroic Fantasy milieu with Gothic trappings. So “acid Gothic” was an attempt to merge different genres, different motifs, different concepts, unto a synthesis that hadn’t been done before, using modern writing ideas and experimental techiiilques.

Elliot: In what ways have your experiences with, LSD and other mind-altering drugs proven artistically enlarging?

Wagncr:  You don’ t nave to look further than Coleridge, for example, for the strong effect of opium on the imagination. Writers are frequently trying mind-altering experiences. One age, it’s opium, another age, it’s absinthe. Hashish was very big at one point. Marijuana was the clandestine drug of tine ‘‘lost generation.“ At one point, bootleg hooch, was big. In the ‘60s. LSD dominated the scene, and had advantages over in lot of the others

I think the main thing that it did was that it tended to alter your perceptions. You aren‘t opening the doors of perception, but you’re altering perception so that you’re seeing reality from a different point of view. It’s get­ting the different perspective, the different view, that enhances your understanding of significances and relationships.

It’s like the old story about the blind men trying to describe tine elephant, each one hanging onto a different portion of its anatomy, and saying. “An elephant is like a snake,” “An elephant is like a wall.” “An elephant is like a tree. With mind-expanding drugs, after you’ve been hanging onto the elephant’s foot, you go apart from yourself and see the whole elephant.

A lot of writers - Lovecraft is an example - have said they’ve gotten visions in dreams that they’ve later used for stories. You don’t dream a novel or trip a novel, but you maybe get an inspir­ation. In a story that I did, “The Dark Muse,” the opening passage was an acid trip. The final chapter of Dark Crusade. “In the Lair of Yslsl,” is a collection of all the bad trips that I could think of at the time. That’s the acid coming into the Gothic. If I had been writing during prohibition, my nightmarish happenings in some of the Kane books night have been due to hangovers from bathtub gin.

Elliot: Does your fiction contain a personal message? Do you write with that objective in mind?

Wagner: Yes. I try not to make it as horribly obtrusive as a “message,” but there are little bits that people can pick up on. Kane is written to be enjoyed on multiple levels. Some people will pick up a Kane book for a good, quick action read. Other people will want to look a bit deeper and find other things, whether it’s an in-joke, a head-game, or some of my own philosophy of life. The anti­war motif is recurrent in the Kane books, which makes the gratuitous violence charge an interesting criticism.

Dark Crusade, which is probably the most intricate of the books. includes sin epigraph from William Blake’s London: “And the hapless Soldier’s sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls.” Dark Crusade is about that: ordinary people who are caught up in the cogs of so­ciety, of a social movement, which they have no control over. You must either conform or die. If you do conform, you’re destroyed by becoming one of the soulless members of a mass Society. War is the means to power. Those who hold the power reap its rewards; those who win that power for them earn only slavery and death.

Kane’s ally and eventual chief antagonist in Dark Crusade, Orted Ak-Ceddi, was based on Billy Graham and Richard Nixon - a religious zealot with mass political power and no scruples about increasing his power. (The Vietnam War and Watergate were all too real when I was writing Dark Crusade.) After the final battle, Orted escapes, the leader who has brought about the slaughter of millions of people. Some fans speculated from this that I must be planning on writing a sequel. Well, I wasn’t. On the contrary, Death Angel’s Shadow, published three years earlier, mentions in the first story that Kane eventually caught up with Orted and killed him. Kane did this for his own purposes, though; he had been double-crossed and wanted revenge. He wasn’t trying to right wrongs. The point I was making by having Orted escape is that the leaders are never punished. In war, the leaders never go out and die, the generals stay at their desks, the politicians stay in the State House. but they keep sending the soldiers out to die for the causes that they believe inn. At the end of tire war, the generals shake hands and go out to plot other wars. The politi­cians are re-elected, or else go off to San Clemente and live off the taxpayers. In war, it’s the soldiers who suffer and the civil­ians who suffer, while the leaders who start the wars reap the profits and share none of the risks.

Efliot; In Night Winds, one of your stories contains the line “Security equals boredom equals stagnation equals death.” Is this also part of your own personal philosophy?

Wagner; Yes, that’s a bit of my philosophy. Also, it’s a part of the underlying philosophy 0f the Kane series. In a settled existence, nothing changes, and, if it can‘t change, it eventually deteriorates. A society or civilization can exist for only so long, then it has to undergo so severe a transformation that it results in the disruption of that society in order to move onto another level.

Kane is a motive force. He may be destructive, but wherever he goes, things have changed when he’s gone. He’s like a comet or a glacier. No matter how well entrenched the status quo, once Kane becomes involved, there’ll be some changes made.

that statement? [sic; looks like a misprint in the original publication]

It’s a philosophy that might have grown Out of the late ‘60s, when there was a tremendous feeling of individual helplessness in the face of society. The Vietnam War was kind of the culmination of that - being sent off by a society you detested to defend that society for a cause that was against your principles (and immoral even according to the principles of that society), and being powerless to do anything because you were only an individual against am entire society. You had a feeling that this was going to go on and on, and that the only way you were going to stop it was to tear it all down. There’s still a feeling of desperation - that when a situation is intolerable, it must be changed, and if violence will change it, so be it.

Elliot: You’ve said that the “raw material” for your books comes ‘mostly from a mood… rather than an idea.” What did you mean by that?

Wagner: There are various approaches to writing a story. One is to write “idea stories”: get an idea for a story, plot it out, write it down. On the other hand, I usually write to create a cer­tain mood - often as a response to having experienced that mood. An example would be “Mirage,” a vam­pire story in Death Angel’s Shadow.
The inspiration came while doing acid and listening to an album by one of the early psychedelic rock groups, Ultimate Spinach. “Sing a Last Song of Valdese,” one of the stories in Night Winda, grew out of a mood I experienced in the North Carolina mountains. Obray Ramsey was playing some mountain ballads on his banjo, and I was probably crocked on White Lightning at the time. While he was singing, I sud­denly got this flash - an eerie feeling of the dark mountains and the loneliness of lost love. Rather than simply tell a story, I’m trying to recreate a mood or an emotion. I’m more interested in atmosphere than action, both in what I read and what I write. If a story achieves the moment that I want, then I’m satisfied.
There are some people who will argue that a sword and sorcery story always has to have some mighty warrior in the center stage, brainlessly hacking and thewing all about him at all tines. Well, Kane’s not that type of character, and I’m not that type of writer. I try to write the sort of stories that would interest me if I were reading them, and, if I’m lucky, maybe someone else will find the stories of interest, too.

Elliot: In the past, you’ve taken umbrage with the term “sword and sorcery.” Why?

Wagner:      It’s simply labeling the genre with the clichés that too many people see as being heroic fantasy’s hackneyed limits. You might as well call it “blood and thunder,” or “thud and blunder,” even. It’s like calling all mys­tery stories “whodunits” or “cops and robbers,“ or calling all west­erns “horse opera.” or calling all science fiction “space opera.” To condemn an entire genre for the clichés of one trivial aspect of it, I find very irritating. I know a lot of science fiction fans and writers hate the tern “Sci-fi.”

“Sword and sorcery” conjures an image of yarns about girls in brass bras who are in constant danger of losing then, and mighty warriors with eighteen—foot—long swords killing wizards and monsters faster than thought. A sword fight every other page, kill a monster every other chapter, and rescue a girl at the end - there’s your sword and sorcery yarn
Science fiction has gone a long, long ways past the old days of space pirates and bug-eyed mon­sters, even though the most suc­cessful things in science fiction lately have been space opera - Star Wars, for example. Science fiction itself, as a genre has become far more literary, far more innovative than standard space opera fare.

There’s also a lot more to epic fantasy or heroic fantasy than sword and sorcery. Would you call Tolkien’s work “sword and sorcery?” You could do that. You’d have to change the titles to something like “Frodo and the Magic Ring.” Covers and blurbs are never very descriptive, and they’re almost always misleading. Imagine something like “Frodo the Invincible,” with

[some text apparently missing here]

set up a situation for a cliché, and then have violated the cliché. There’s the one I mentioned in Bloodstone, where the soldier saves Kane’s life, and then, a few pages later, Kane runs a spear through his back. Kane was grateful for having his life saved, but he didn’t want the guy to get in the way of something else.

The best example is “Undertow,” another story in the Night Winds collection, where your typical sword and sorcery barbarian comes to town and confronts Kane. Kane is playing the role of an evil sor­cerer, in what would be a standard Sword and sorcery plot. I gave the barbarian hero a name I thought summed up all of the clichéd names: “Dragar.” About two years after I wrote the story, Dell Comics brought out a sword and sorcery comic book with a character named “Dagar” in it, so I must have been on the right track.

The hero in “Undertow” is a big, blond, fearless barbarian who comes into town and falls in love with a beautiful girl who is the captive of the evil sorcerer who has the entire town at his mercy. The barbarian has a magic sword and all the standard trappings. The difference is that the evil sorcerer he is up against is Kane, and not all is what it seems to be, including the girl that he falls in love with. The structure of “Under­tow,” going back to mood stories, was based on Last Year at Marienbad, a French film that I saw and admired because it distorted linear time. The scenes are Out of se­quence, and are frequently repeated from another character’s view of reality. In fact, the film was so disjointed that, when I originally saw it, they ran a couple of the reels out of sequence. No one noticed it at the time. “Undertow” is structured so that objective realities take precedence over linear time, creating a disjointed sequence of events, like the ebb and flow of a nightmare.

 

 

Interview with Karl Wagner by Dr. Elliot, July 1981 (Posting elements as time permits)

Karl Edward Wagner
Dr. Jeffrey Elliot

INTERVIEW ~ Part II

Elliot; In one interview, you stated that, as a young reader, you often identified more with the villain in a story than with the hero. What is the psychological appeal of such characters?

Waqner; Anyone who analyzed that would probably say it was childhood rebellion, adolescent rebellion, an identification with the aggressor. Especially for young people, it‘s common that they identify with the villain of the story. Without go­ing into analytic detail, I always liked the villains because they were the ones who were usually do­ing something interesting in the story, who literally got the plot going. The villains were kind of heroic figures to me.
Captain Nemo, in Twenty Thou­sand Leagues Under the Sea, was one of my favorites. The movie must have cone out around the time I was pushing ten or eleven. I really identified with Captain Nemo. Here’s this guy who has lost his wife and family to some unspecified foreign power, but instead of being down in the dumps about it and deciding to join the monastery, he’s made himself an atomic subma­rine, and is cruising around having swell adventures, sinking his enemies’ ships right and left.

Then there was Peter Pan, the immortal bad boy. As a kid, I could identify with that. Peter Pan doesn’t have to go to school, doesn’t have to grow up. He can stay up all might if he wants to. He lives in Never-Never Land, fights pirates and consorts with mernaids and battles Indians, instead of having to get up in the morning and brush his teeth and go to school.
I can’t say whether everybody has this feeling of empathy with the villain or not; I know that a lot of people do. People will say to me, “I’m not really sure if I like Kane, but he certainly is fascinating.” Well, I hope he is fascinating, but I’m not really asking people to like him, like falling in love with Mark Hamill in Star Wars.

The villain, at least to me, is the most interesting character. In fact, Kane was my attempt to combine things that I liked in various villains. Other writers do it by combining things they like in various heroes. That could be what Ian Fleming did with James Bond. On the other hand the main strength of the James Bond books, and the movies, too, has been the villains.
As a rule, the villain is someone who is extremely intelligent - an expert criminal, an arch-fiend, a master genius - and who is somewhat weak, usually an old man.

Fu Manchu, for example, is one of my favorite villains. He always had to have henchmen do his dirty work, though. He could never really wade in there where the blood was thickest. and dispatch people with blows right and left. Sometimes, the villains are the big, dumb brutal ones - the Lee Marvin types. These are the heavies who have physical power, but no brains. And then there are the nice, little. suave, nasty villains, like Peter Lorre or Charles Laughton. for example, who can invite their vic­tims to dinner, sit there drinking fine wines and quoting choice bits of poetry, and planning on vivisecting them within the next fif­teen minutes before the soup is served.

Kane is a sort of combination of all of these. He’s a master genius, who also is powerful enough to handle his end of the fight and then some - and then, along with the intellectualism, has a psychotic streak in him, kind of a combination of Fu Manchu and Dracula and Billy the Kid, with maybe a touch of the giant from “Jack, the Giant Killer.”

I do see evidence that people tend to be more fascinated with the villain than the hero. You’d be hard—pressed to find anyone in the U.S. who hasn’t heard of Dracula, But if you ask the man in the street who Jonathan Harker is, virtually no one would know. You remember the arch-fiends, but the poor, beleaguered heroes who spend the whole novel trying to undo what the villain is doing, you can’t even recall their names.

Elliot:  What makes Kane such a memorable character? Why is he so popular with readers?

Wagner:  Any series character is going to get a following. Collec­tors tend to be obsessive-compul­sives who want the “entire set.” Darkness Weaves, when it came out from Powell in 1970, languished on a few porno stands and disappeared. Then, when Kane caught on and people began finding out that there was an earlier Kane book that no one had read, I had dealers tell me they had waiting lists of maybe twenty-five customers wanting that hook.

Maybe Kane inspires a fanatical following, because he’s a different series character. A lot of people identify with a character who is a rebel and gets away with it. Kane is a character for the modern age, a unique character, not a pseudo-Frodo or a pseudo-Conan. Kane knows that he has been damned by his god. He’s not about to turn to religion and try to beg forgiveness. Next time God sees him coming, God better run.

Elliot:     How do you view those critics who fault the Kane series for excessive violence? How legitimate is that charge?

Wagner:  “Gratuitous violence,” I think, is the term that has been used in association with Kane. I maintain that it’s not gratuitous - it’s essential to the story. The Kane books are certainly very violent, and if violence isn’t your thing, read about Hobbits. I do, however, feel that Kane is a realistic portrayal of violence. There are a lot of different types of epic fantasy, which is one of the reasons I hate the tern “sword and sorcery.” If you like fairy­land fantasy with beautiful prin­cesses and enchanted castles and dashing young minstrels and cute fairies and elves, that‘s one sub-genre of epic fantasy, and you’re welcome to it. On the other hand, if you read a Kane book and are appalled because people are fight­ing with edged weapons and getting cut, don’t call it “gratuitous violence.” Simply say that it’s not your thing, and if you don’t want to read it, go read another fairyland fantasy book, instead.

Sam Peckinpah again becomes an irresistable analogy. He’s been criticized for “gratuitous vio­lence,” because in The Wild Bunch, when people are being shot with .45s and shotguns, there’s a splash of blood and the person is knocked head over heels. But this is what really happens when you get hit at close range with a load of double-aught buck, as opposed to the old westerns where somebody gets shot by a .45 at point-blank range, clutches his chest and says, “Oh, you got me!” and slowly crumbles to the floor.

Some fans think that armed warriors, swinging swords at one another, can fight a battle with­out anybody being hurt. You cut your finger peeling a potato, and it hurts. Imagine that you’ve just been slashed with a six-foot long sword, and it’s your entrails that you’re looking at. People start swinging edged weapons, and things have a way of being cut off and cut open, and people bleed a lot when they’re taken apart. Combat is violent, and that’s the reality of it.

Dark Crusade probably drew the most fire for “gratuitous vio­lence.” The book itself was in­spired by the wars of religion in Europe. Over the period of cen­turies, civilized people destroyed towns, laid waste to other coun­tries, killed and tortured millions - all in the name of religion. Was the violence in Dark Crusade an unrealistic portrayal of religious war? If you think so, talk to the Huguenots after the Saint Barthol­omew’s Day Massacre. Ask them if violence was a realistic mode of expression in religious argument. You need only go back to World War II, when, if you were Jewish, into the oven you went. Reality was the nightmarish absurdity of six mil­lion people being killed because of their ancestry. If you write a novel about World War II, should you be accused of “gratuitous violence” because you mention the Holocaust? Or because you mention that a flamethrower cooks people alive when it hits them? This is violence, certainly, but. it’s realistic. If this sort of realism offends you, watch “The Waltons.” Take fantasy instead of reality.

Elliot: How would you respond to the charge, made by some critics, that Kane hasn’t caught up with the women’s movement - that women are treated in the series as subser­vient to men?

Wagner:  Any critic saying that has definitely never read any of my work. That’s a criticism that you could level at Howard, but then Howard was writing for the pulp audience of the ‘30s, when pulp heroines were, by editorial decree, no more than beautiful things to be rescued.

As a matter of fact, some of my friends who are active in women‘s lib. including friends who are militant lesbians, have rather liked the women in the Kane series because they weren’t the standard “Conan, oh, save me, save me!” types. For example, the character, Teres, in Bloodstone, is certainly a liberated woman. Teres is a woman who is very much in charge of things; she certainly leads her own life and is not subservient to anyone. I think that you could say that Teres is the first liberated woman to appear in an epic fantasy novel-and by that I don’t mean she’s simply Conan in drag. The female lead in Dark Crusade is, again, a person who does not follow the standard fantasy clichés. Kane doesn’t go about rescuing women, which is a standard plot in sword and sorcery stories. However, because some critics label a book as “sword and sorcery,” they automatically assume they already know what it’s going to be about. And they never read the damned book, because they don’t like sword and sorcery. Critics are the first to judge a book by its cover and look no further. I read an astonishing review of Bloodstone where the reviewer was not at all familiar with the character or any earlier books, and started writing the review as a diatribe against pseudo-Conan trash. About half way through the review, he evidently started to read the book.

He completely changed his opinion of the book and the character, but he didn’t have the afterthought to go back and correct the misinformation he was ladling out with invective in the first half of the review, before he ever read the book and found out that Bloodstone was not another “Bongo the Barbarian Rescues the Princess” novel.

The women in Kane are very independent characters. Kane is not a romantic lead, nor do the Kane books follow the old formula of boy-meets-girl and so on. I don’t think there’s any way someone could read a Kane book and say that the women are the helpless-girl stereotypes. A criticism might be made that the women in the Kane stories are frequently amoral, calculating, and quite ruthless, but not that they are simpering girls in diaphanous gowns.

Elliot: In an interview, a few years back, you stated, “Ten years from now, I may grow up and find I want to do something significant for society other than write this escapist, juvenile fare.” Is this how you really feel about what you’re writing?

Wagner: No. I was being sarcastic with that comment. When you go into free-lance writing after already having set up a nice medical career, you have a feeling that, “Gosh, I’m having a good time. There must be something bad about this.” Some people that would bother. It doesn’t bother me. It’s sort of like being on an endless summer vacation, and you keep thinking that eventually it will be the end of August and you’ll have to go back to school or have to start earning a living or something. It’s the old view that you shouldn’t enjoy what you’re doing. Working for a living is supposed to be drudgery, something you hate. Very rarely do you find people who are doing what they want to in life, and who are making a living doing it. Right now, I am. My opinions or attitudes may change, and I may someday be sitting behind a desk in a three-piece gray suit and a narrow tie, advising my young pa­tients that they ought to make something out of themselves in life and not to give rein to their day-dream fantasies. Right now, I doubt it. At the beginning of Peter Pan, Barrie writes that “all children but one grow up.” I’m like Peter Pan. I may be the one who has never grown up.

Elliot: How do you select the names for your characters? Where do they originate?

Wagner: Generally, they’re imaginative. There are a number of approaches you can take on names. One of the things that Howard did in the Conan series was to give the characters semi-mythical names, for the most part. He said that the names would sound familiar because we still had vague memories of this earlier age. That’s why some of his characters have Latin nines, some have Spanish names, some have Italian names, and some of the place names are almost real place names - instead of India, you have Vendhya. I find this irritating. It’s the sort of thing a kid does - garbled borrowings from stories and Movies without any real awareness as to what’s appropriate.

Another approach is what Tolkien did, where you are almost creating your own language, but using a really well-researched, scholarly basis in Celtic myth and Celtic languages. It comes across authentic as all hell, although you may need a glossary.

Still, another approach is to try to create names that do not have an imediate identification with a classical or medieval European milieu, which is what I usually try to do. One of the cliches of “sword and sorcery” is that you usually have a pseudo-Arabian Nights setting, or a pseudo-Classical set­ting, or maybe a pseudo-Nordic setting. The Kane stories are set on different continents in an age before history begins. It wouldn’t make sense for the names to sound like something out of Bullfinch’s Mythology.

Elliot: As you view it, what part of being a fantasy writer is learned, and what pafl is innate?

Wagner:  It would certainly vary with each writer. I’m one who believes very firmly that you have to have the ability to write within you, or else all the creative writ­ing classes you take and the authors whom you study will avail you nothing. It’s a lot like being an artist. You can take art his­tory courses study the works of the masters, and speak about art in the most expert manner, but you still couldn’t create a memorable painting. You have to have some­thing in you, some ability to tell a story, to communicate ideas, to take what is in your head and put it on paper in recognizable fashion so that the reader will be able to recreate in his imagination what you were saying. You’ve got to have that talent, or else taking creative writing classes and study­ing Russian authors won’t help you.

I was a History major as an undergraduate, then attended medi­cal school for my professional training. The only creative writ­ing courses I’ve attended were a couple that I’d been asked to sit in on and explain what it is to be a “writer.” Maybe if you read my stuff, you’ll say, “Obviously, he’s never had a creative writing class.” On the other hand, you do have to have a certain amount of technical skill; otherwise, all you may do is come up with some great idea, but never be able to communicate it because you lack the technical skills required to write prose fiction.

Technique is something that you’ll pick up, though, if you’ve got both the talent that it takes to write and the drive, the deter­mination, or killer instinct, what­ever it takes to keep working at it until you get it right. For myself I picked up technique by reading a lot of other writers whose work I enjoyed; I’d find myself reading things I disliked, and wondering, “Why didn’t I like that?” When I read things I liked, I thought. “Is this an effect I can duplicate? Is this an effect I can use in my own writing?”

Early on. a lot of fantasy fans read Lovecraft. They think, “Boy, Lovecraft is great.” So they sit down and start wiring stories, using four or five adjectives for each noun, and manage to say “el— dritch,” “blasphemous,” and “squa­mous” at least three times in each paragraph. They are trying to duplicate the more glaring aspects of Lovecraft’s prose technique, but that’s not really what’s good in Lovecraft, I’m fond of him, al­though I admit that he’s a terrible stylist. To my mind, what’s im­pressive about Lovecraft is his profound cosmic negativism: the idea that mankind is confronted by horrors that are completely beyond his comprehension, forces against which he is powerless, and when he begins to realize these horrors exist, they inevitably destroy him.

Elliot:  Speaking of technique, how conscious of technique are you as you write? Is experimentation an important objective?

Wagner:  I’m very conscious of technique, and very interested in experimenting with it, With the stories in Night Winds, for example, each one is an experiment in tech­nique or theme. In “Undertow,” time is out of sequence. I did that to create a deliberate night­marish effect in the story. Robert W. Chambers is said to have created deliberate barriers to final comprehension - rather like an artist who chooses to draw a formless, nebulous horror instead of, say, a carefully delineated werewolf. There are times when you want to do one, and times when you want to do the other. If all of your hor­rors are vague and formless, your readers will decide that you don’t really know what’s happening your­self. In “Sing a Last Song of Valdese,” Kane is off-stage, but is central to the story. He is incognito, seated among a group of travelers who are discussing Kane as a legand, and his identity and presence are essential to the denouement.