Excerpted from Benjamin Szumskyj‘s excellent anthology Black Prometheus, the first collection of scholarly essays on the writings of Karl Edward Wagner.

As I write this it is Christmas Eve, and 12 days after Karl Wagner’s birthday. Christmas was Karl’s second favorite holiday, after Hallowe’en. In our childhoods in Knoxville he and I, unbeknownst to one another, listened raptly to our radios in the month preceding Christmas to the perennial, serialized story The Cinnamon Bear, first broadcast in 1937, the story of Judy and Jimmy Barton and their quest for the Silver Star, without which “Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas.” Their search for the Silver Star was constantly stymied by bad luck, treacherous friends and the evil malignity of the terrifying Wintergreen Witch. If you missed the final episode Judy and Jimmy never recovered the star and their Christmas would not be Christmas for another year, an eternity to a youngster. Years after Karl and I met and graduated from high school and went on to college I found a recording of the all but forgotten show on reel-to-reel tape and Karl and I, at last, heard the entire series from beginning to end, in the space of a single day. Our girlfriends looked on in consternation as we rose to our feet as the last episode ended, with, perhaps, one vagrant tear.

They could not imagine the impact this children’s tale had had on our formative years. The character Karl found most intriguing was the Wintergreen Witch who dedicated all her terrible power to blackening the twins’ Christmas, to seeing to it that they never possessed the fulfilment symbolized by the Silver Star and, perhaps, to turning them into helpless mice or toads while she was at it. “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” includes, in the words of that song, scary ghost stories. I think that was especially true for Karl, who knew there was a black presence lurking in the corner behind the Christmas tree when the lights were turned off, a seething, churning nothingness which, if it reached you, could turn you inside out.

Benjamin Szumskyj has given us the marvelous Christmas gift of announcing this book of essays [Black Prometheus] on Karl and his work. I’m grateful that Benjamin is doing his part to see to it that Karl Edward Wagner at last receives the recognition he is due as one of the great fantasy and horror writers and editors of the 20th Century. When Karl died I, on impulse did a Lycos search – there was no such thing as Google – and brought up only two sites that mentioned him in passing. Tonight a Lycos search for “Karl Edward Wagner” brought up 164,400 hits. Not only is Wagner an important writer in his own right, he has influenced the work of others, from comic books to novels to movies (The Blair Witch Project, for example, is widely believed to have been influenced by “Sticks”) to the broadening of the way epic fantasy is approached.

What was unique about the way Wagner wrote? These are not the Appalachian “Gotcha!” Taley-Poe tales of my grandpa Walter, calculated to send me giggling under the covers. These are tales of horror, horror that, however hard we may seek to ignore it, is always present, tapping at our shoulder in the midst of merriment, even on Christmas, like the insistent lyches in the Dance of Death woodcuts of Holbein. This is what makes the Ghost of Christmas Future in Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” the most frightening of all the specters.

This Christmas horror is not the horror of the escaped mental patient dressed as Santa Claus drawn by Jack Davis in the old EC Tales from the Crypt comic book, the Santa with the ax dripping red, invited into the house by the delighted child. This is the horror of suspecting that some Solstice, perhaps this one, the light is not coming back. 

One year during this season, while Karl and I were still in high school, we were at his house, listening to his parents’ huge Grundig console. We had found a place on the dial where we could hear simultaneously a radio dramatization of the Christmas story and a TV western. One bit of blended dialogue sticks in my mind: “But how can you, a virgin, be with child?”

“I say unto you, it is the son of God; he will be called the Prince of Peace.”

“You’ll have a hard time selling that to the jury.”

Cynical beyond our years, Karl and I had a good laugh over that. The U.S. was still full of the self-confidence and buoyant consumerism carried over from the fifties, but the nation’s collective self-assurance had been shaken by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of our youthful president. Karl more than I sensed the repressed disquiet that coiled beneath the holiday merriment.

It is not true that suicides peak on Christmas, but calls to suicide prevention lines do. Many begin to feel the emptiness in their lives closing around them, compressing their lungs, threatening to turn them inside out; they see the dark husk of their unfulfilled existence limned by the cheerful, sparkling lights of the joyous celebrations and loving devotion of seemingly happy people all around them. Despair rises during the festivities of the darkest time of the year, but does not reach its quiet crescendo, its finale of a single muffled sob, for a week or so, until the New Year dawns, as gray and hopeless as the Old Year. This is true horror, not terror, not the trip-hammer panic that impels us to flee for our lives, but horror that constrains us to accept our fate, the sick realization that we have arrived at last at the moment we knew was coming, the moment we can no longer pretend that our life has the faintest scrap of purpose, to ourselves nor to anyone we care about, and our dread of death is less than our dread of life. Our last doubt has evaporated, and there is no reason to hesitate further at fashioning our most artful noose, at loading the right caliber bullet – no point in making a mess – at arranging the pills in a neat row along the edge of our bedside table next to a full tumbler of cold water upon a coaster. Or at finishing off the liter of liquor and opening another. We no longer care who finds our remains, or when.

This was the horror that underlay Karl’s fiction, not the horror of the masked killer waiting within your closet with one of your kitchen knives, but the paralyzing fear that the murderous madman is a lesser menace, that, in the words of Swinburne and the title of one of Karl’s Wellman anthologies, there are Worse Things Waiting for man than death. In Wagner’s The Sign of the Salamander the character who is to become the hapless pawn of the arch-villain, in a moment of anguish, places a gun to his temple and pulls the trigger. The villain intervenes, trapping his victim at the instant of his greatest despair. Thereafter the wretched would-be suicide is forced to do his tormentor’s bidding, but is it from fear the fiend will permit the bullet to plow through his brain, or that he will not?
 
Karl said that his epic fantasies of Kane began as horror stories. Amidst all the ancient spectacle of vast armies, supernatural wonders and the rise and fall of kingdoms, Kane never loses sight of the fact that his long life is a curse cast upon him by a mad god, a god much like Lovecraft’s Azathoth, Lord of All Things, the blind idiot god at the center of chaos, “encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demoniac flute held in nameless paws," a god Lovecraft describes as “a primal horror, too horrible for description." This is the God that Kane struggles against, against his earthly legions and against the cosmic blues that come from knowing the Author of All Things is semiliterate.

I think this is the crux of Wagner’s horror, a sense that beneath the present horror lies a greater horror still, an awareness that more terrible than the fate that pursues us is the fate that lies in wait for us. As we step off the jetty and fall toward the icy water below, reflections of the Christmas lights on the bridge above dance on the Stygian waves, and carols being sung by a choir in the nearby square blend into the shrill cacophony of the flopping horde of obscenities dancing at the center of chaos.

Karl and I had exchanged Christmas presents since our days at old Central High. When I got word that he’d died in the month of his favorite holiday I’d already, with unaccustomed providence, purchased his Christmas gift. On Christmas Eve I drank it by myself, a fifth of his second favorite liquor, Myers’s rum. His Christmas presents to me had usually been books, most often somber tomes, the works of Poe and Baudelaire and, yes, Wagner. Why was Karl unable to fully embrace times of success and good cheer, Christmas and marriage and professional acclaim without overlaying them with a sense of doom? Many writers suffer from bouts of severe depression. Many commit suicide: Hemingway and Camus and Hunter Thompson and Yukio Mishima and Iris Chang and Sylvia Plath and Wally Wood – better known for his horror and sci-fi artwork – and Jack Cole and far, far too many others to list. And still more writers commit slower forms of suicide, by way of drugs or alcohol or placing themselves deliberately in harms way like Byron. Perhaps they chafe at being unable to plot their own lives and settle for plotting their own deaths. Or maybe their special sensitivity to the vagaries of life makes them feel life’s losses too strongly. One thing is sure; when Karl Wagner wrote horror he wrote from the heart.

Of course, Karl was also a psychiatrist, another profession that is assumed to require a special sensitivity to life’s pain. Though the data is not yet conclusive, psychiatrists are also said to have a very high suicide rate. Perhaps anyone with too great a comprehension of things as they are is at risk.

Karl was gifted, but it was a Monkey’s Paw sort of gift. With the highest IQ score of any entrant into UNC medical school at that time, Karl was, without question, one of the three or four most intelligent people I ever knew. All those people destroyed themselves. One, a journalist, also drank himself to death alone in his house. Another, a poetess, managed, almost miraculously, alone in her house, to discharge both barrels of a double-barreled shotgun into her chest. And then there was Karl, a doctor who knew exactly what he was doing, who also destroyed himself, alone in his house. What do people of such high intelligence know that the rest of us have not grasped? Here, on Christmas eve, alone in my house, I do not want to know.

Karl moved from medicine to art; I have taken the reverse course. A year or two ago at this time I had just finished my first semester of physiology. We had a male and a female cadaver. The man had come from a homeless shelter, the woman from a nursing home where she had acquired at least one pressure ulcer. Whether they had volunteered to further our knowledge of anatomy I don’t know, but I did learn their actual first names: they were Marian and Joseph. Marian is a variant of Mary, and in some texts the mother of Jesus is referred to as the Virgin Marian. As it happens, the deaths of infants are regarded as tragedies, unlike the deaths of old people who have outgrown their usefulness – except as cadavers – and infant specimens are much harder to come by, so no physiology lab crèche was possible. We had representatives of most of the animals in the stable, though: a cow heart and equine bones and a recently harvested sheep pluck, lungs and windpipe, that not long before had been bleating in terror. I meant to place a wreath on each of our cadavers’ coffin-like tanks, but never got around to it. If their slate-grey brains had been capable of thought, or, for that matter, any of the several pounds of human brains sloshing around in our five-gallon bucket-o’-brains, what would they have said about the glories of Christmas?

There are depths of knowledge to which no human can sink and rise untainted. Happily, most of us are readers, not writers, of horror and we never have to attain those depths. Writers like Karl have sacrificed their own peace of mind to give us the present of just enough of a glimpse behind the shroud to afford us the merest frisson of fear, just enough to make our holiday festivities all the merrier by contrast. If there are moments when Karl Wagner lifts the shroud just a bit too far and gifts us with a bit more than we cared to see, that is unfortunate. Regrettably, there is a no-return policy. 

To Karl, wherever he may be, and to all readers of horror everywhere, may you enjoy good food, good drink and good fellowship in this darkest of seasons.

John Mayer
Christmas Eve 2006