Ten years ago, the bloggers at the award-winning website, The Cimmerian, got together and commemorated the fifteenth anniversary of Karl Edward Wagner’s death. I would imagine some people—with the preconception that The Cimmerian was “only about Sword and Sorcery fiction”—were surprised that the blog posts in question slanted toward Karl’s horror work, rather than his tales of heroic fantasy. However, the bloggers in question knew their KEW and that meant the horror side of the equation couldn’t be ignored. It was celebrated, in fact, on that long-ago day in the lonesome October.

The posts are still relevant and I hope you enjoy them.

Reflections Upon Karl Edward Wagner, Fifteen Years Gone

The Terror of the Absurd: Karl Edward Wagner’s “Sticks”

The horror: Karl Edward Wagner’s contributions as writer and editor

Lost in Loss

It can be safely stated that the late, great Steve Tompkins was one of Wagner’s biggest fans. Steve died six months before the Wagner commemoration at TC took place. Below is a three-part series by Tompkins looking at Karl’s work, especially the Kane stories, which was published at The Cimmerian in 2008. I consider it some of the best literary criticism ever done on Wagner.

Something to Do With Deathlessness, Part One: Violence Reigns

Something to Do With Deathlessness, Part Two: Eyes We Dare Not Meet in Dreams

Something to Do With Deathlessness, Part Three: Splintered Shards of Time’s Reflection

Brian Murphy was one of the TC bloggers who commemorated Wagner back in 2009. He has written a post for the twenty-fifth anniversary here:

Remembering Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994)

As noted here, Scott Oden wrote a Wagner post on his own blog ten years ago. He’s written a new one for this anniversary:

Twenty-Five Years Gone

Author David J. West also raised a glass to Karl’s shade ten years ago. Short on time, he reposted his cool tribute from yesteryear:

Across the Threshhold of Dream

Last, but not least, KEW mega-fan, Charles R. Rutledge, has done a great write-up on Karl’s horror fiction right here at the DMR Blog:

Karl Edward Wagner: Horror at Heart

For those who checked out the TC blog posts above, you might notice that everything was posted on October 13th, not the 14th. That was due to longstanding confusion—confusion lasting to this day—regarding Karl’s date of death. Some websites list one, some the other. A relative of Karl’s sent me a photo of Mr. Wagner’s gravestone. The official date—carved in stone—is October 14, 1994.