Three for the Road is a companion piece to my article from last year, “Three People is a Movement.” This time, instead of looking at writings about Karl Edward Wagner, I’ll be looking at Wagner as he appears in fiction. Below are three stories from the past ten years that have contained characters loosely based on, or inspired by, Karl Edward Wagner.

“Sweetums” by John Langan

The first of the stories referencing Wagner is “Sweetums” by John Langan. The story originally appeared in the Joseph S. Pulver edited King in Yellow anthology A Season in Carcosa (Miskatonic River Press*). It later appeared in Langan’s fourth collection, Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies (Word Horde).

The tale depicts the horrific journey of an actress as she shows up on the set of an experimental film. Shortly after she arrives, the lines of reality and film blur. As described by Langan in the author’s notes in Children of the Fang, his influences included both Robert Chambers and David Lynch. At one point, during the actress’s mad dash through the set, she stumbles upon a writer sitting at his desk. Cue one Karl Edward Wagner.

“In front of her, a man sat behind a typewriter supported by a card table that quivered as his thick fingers stabbed its keys. The man’s longish hair was more brown than red, unlike the beard that flared from his cheeks, which was practically orange. His broad face was pink, puffy, the blood vessels broken across it mapping a route signposted with empty siblings of the bottle of Jack Daniel’s stationed at the typewriter’s left.”

He is muttering to himself, dropping references to Robert Chambers, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, and probably others, as he types furiously at the typewriter. He is seemingly driven mad through the desire to create, but when the protagonist looks at his discarded papers, they are blank.

This scene is just one of many terrifying experiences the actress stumbles upon as she is pursued through the film set of horrors. His Wagner scene proved a nice nod to those writers who came before.

“D T” by Laird Barron

“D T” also originally appeared in A Season in Carcosa. It has since been translated into Spanish and has appeared in the Laird Barron micro-collection A Little Brown Book of Burials (Borderlands Press). The book was number two of the Borderlands Little Book series. Borderlands Press later featured Wagner in number eleven of the series, A Little Ochre Book of Occult Stories.

A Little Brown Book of Burials has become a bit infamous for excluding the last page of “D T” as well as several other errors. Barron was quick to include the missing material in an errata section on his website and, in my opinion, being a classy guy and going above and beyond, wrote this on his blog,

 As a thank you and apology to my fans: this winter I will write an original short story to be distributed exclusively as a PDF to those who purchased A Little Brown Book… 

Writer’s blog September 28, 2015

In a nutshell, “D T” relates the story of an editor, E, and the last days of her relationship with a Wagneresque author. Following the theme of The King in Yellow, this tale includes the specter of a maddening manuscript in the background. The inclusion of this manuscript is one of the brilliant aspects of this story. I think the original impulse would be to center the story on the manuscript itself. Barron writes a story about the relationship between the editor, the author, and his failing health and career. We receive almost offhanded references to the manuscript as it worms its way in until it is too late, and E is drawn into the horror.

There are multiple clues throughout the story for real-world analogs. Wagner is the author, his agent is Kirby McCauley, and the editor is Ellen Datlow. Obviously, these are based on aspects of these people and are not biographical versions.

Some of the passages that tie the author to Wagner include a six-book fantasy series (Kane), pulp detective stories (Curtiss Stryker), a long-running anthology series as an editor (Year’s Best Horror Stories), and possibly suffering from Lyme disease. He is described as a “Viking biker” and later as “an intimidating mass of muscle beneath the soft pink and gray excess of middle age, a person who was in most ways steadily vanishing from the Earth even as he expanded.”

Barron also nods to several of Wagner’s stories including, “Sticks” (author jokes about a megalith falling on his agent), “Beyond Any Measure” (the problem of doppelgangers), “Neither Brute Nor Human” (fans sucking one’s energy), and “The Last Wolf” (the general state of his career).

References to Ellen Datlow Include the editor’s familiarity with Lovecraft, a love for photography, being the editor of a science/sci-fi magazine owned by a gentleman’s magazine (OMNI and Penthouse), and referring to her as E. I believe the actual relationship between the two is entirely fictional. I once asked Datlow if she knew Wagner, and she responded that she didn’t know him well but remembered seeing him at conventions. 

It seems obvious this story is a nod of the cap to Karl Edward Wagner. But what about that title? D T points to Delirium Tremens, a withdrawal from alcohol resulting in shakes and hallucinations. Very fitting for this story. However, D T is also editor slang for Dedicated To. It could be an homage to Datlow, who Barron has frequently worked with as well as Wagner, one of the greatest King in Yellow storytellers and an admitted influence for Barron.

“The Smoke Lodge” by Michael Griffin

The third story, partially influenced by “D T,” is Michael Griffin’s “The Smoke Lodge.” First appearing in Autumn Cthulhu (Lovecraft eZine Press). It was later reprinted in Griffin’s collection The Human Alchemy (Word Horde).

“The Smoke Lodge” is a bittersweet ghost tale of sorts. It tells the story of a group of colleagues and their loved ones who have gathered after a horror convention. After reminiscing about their lost friend Karlring, they decide on a pilgrimage to the secluded smoke lodge.

Thematically the story examines remembrance and the chain of influence we are each a part of. Particular attention is paid to Karlring’s influence on the group, as he was influenced by those who came before. A burned-out beachside restaurant at the beginning reminds us that people and places “might vanish before its [or their] time.”

Karlring, the depiction of Wagner in this story, is a much looser version of Wagner than in the others. The character has more of the mythic feel of Wagner than tying it into physical descriptions or biographical similarities. I reached out to Griffin for confirmation and some insight into the story.

KEW is definitely an inspiration for The Smoke Lodge. In fact the name Edward Karlring is meant to refer to him pretty directly, with “ring” being a reference to the composer Wagner’s famous “Ring cycle.” . . . Where this came about was from a reading at an earlier Necronomicon, where Laird and Joe Pulver were reading together. . . Laird read from “D T” which made an impression on me, and I talked about it afterward with Joe. Joe said something like, “Some day I’ll be gone and at these conventions people will talk about how they knew me, or about my legendary exploits, like they do about KEW now.” I didn’t want to a write a story where Joe was dead, exactly, so I made Joe another character in the story, and made the late, remembered writer friend more like KEW than Joe himself.

Personal correspondence with the author August 24, 2021

It is fitting there is a little of Wagner and Pulver in Karlring. Pulver, who passed in 2020, is a big reason I’m a Wagner fan today. There was good foresight on Pulver’s part. To me, Pulver is forever linked with The King in Yellow mythos. Though I only knew him as a fan, I was able to see him at several conventions, and he always seemed larger than life. Much like Wagner, I think folks will be telling stories about him for years to come.

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I wanted to say thanks to Justin Steele for introducing me to the story “D T” all those years ago. I’d also like to thank Michael Griffin for taking the time to answer my questions about his story “The Smoke Lodge.”

Keep your ears peeled for episode 3.5 coming soon! Jonathan and I were joined by screenwriter, author, and podcaster Oliver Brackenbury for a rousing discussion of Wagner’s Kane tale “Cold Light.”

Artist links:
Daniele Serra
Matthew Jaffe
Jarek Kubicki

*Ceased publishing in 2013.