Karl Edward Wagner (and his "39 List")

[noivilbo]

I've read only ten on the list. Of those, I can say each is a very different animal. But if you like KEW's Kane stories, you might want to consider putting Melmoth on the top of your reading pile, perhaps followed by The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Alraune is very sharp, dark and strange, and I highly recommend it. Frankenstein is a masterpiece, but you know that. I liked Echo of a Curse, but it is very very far from my favourite of these. And thankfully it wasn't as savage as a lot of people have made it out to be, at least compared to other things you've likely read, like newspapers. The evil and brutality in The Torture Garden, however, might drive you into reading ethics. Dark Sanctuary was fun, it would have made an excellent script for a Hammer horror film. It's also the most Lovecraftian of the ones I've read on the list. I barely remember Black Corridor; I may have been really high when I read it as a teenager. Triffids was far more intense than I expected, but I read it on a beach where there was no vegetation. I couldn't finish The Burning Court, it just wasn't to my taste.

[Druidic]

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The evil and brutality in The Torture Garden, however, might drive you into reading ethics. Dark Sanctuary was fun, it would have made an excellent script for a Hammer horror film. It's also the most Lovecraftian of the ones I've read on the list. I barely remember Black Corridor; I may have been really high when I read it as a teenager. Triffids was far more intense than I expected, but I read it on a beach where there was no vegetation. I couldn't finish The Burning Court, it just wasn't to my taste.--Noivilbo

Thanks for the info! I've read all the Gothic stuff but some of the other titles were new to me. I agree with you about Carr. The books listed aren't bad but not terribly satisfying if you want the real Weird Stuff. My Mom liked mysteries and I got her a lot of his books and the ones with supernatural elements I ended up reading myself...

I'll have to check out Dark Sanctuary, it sounds interesting. I don't find books like The Torture Garden terribly interesting and do my best to avoid them but thanks for the warning LOL.
btw, I just read that Ryan was a woman. That's interesting...
When I was about fourteen I found copies of Doctors Wear Scarlet and Werewolf of Paris in the racks of my neighborhood drugstore (Ah, those were the days!). I liked the latter appreciably more than the former though Raven is a good writer.

[noivilbo]

There's been some debate on Ryan's gender. John Pelan, who (may we praise him for getting many of these rare titles on the Wagner list back in print) has argued Ryan was female. James Doig (see his posts on the Wormwoodiana blog) says Ryan was male.

Dark Sanctuary is interesting in that the author was a life-long Christian who wrote the book wanting to do the Lovecraft thing in a world where Christ had more power than Cthulhu.

[Murony_Pyre]

Yes, but Cthulhu is not "evil" per se, whereas Satan is. Cthulhu is only evil in the sense that an inimical alien force is evil. I love the list overall, as it introduced me to so many authors I'd never heard of before, but Dark Sanctuary was actually one of the ones I disliked intensely---I recall thinking the writing pretty hamfisted.
Interestingly, a few years ago I spoke with Pelan on the phone and he informed me that the author was still among the land of the living, albeit extremely elderly.

I'm firmly in the Doig camp re: Ryan's gender, and lean (the key word, which differentiates it from the Pelan/Olson camp) to male--we will probably never know for sure, but who knows?--Rex Ryan may have had help from Kay Seaton but he was a writer himself who wrote dramatic works, etc. so it is not out of the question that he wrote novels as well. Olson's whole "not being able to write convincing male characters" thing never rang true to me as a viable argument for Ryan being a female---I mean very few writers male or female can, especially commercial (read: plup) writers.

I've come to the obvious but unavoidable realization that "weird" as in "weird fiction" holds a very important distinction over "horror" as in "horror fiction". Weird is not meant to frighten so much as alter or warp what is already there, the way a dream might. Horror is mostly due to corporeal danger (why DF Lewis' Horror Without Victims anthology is such a high-bar but probably more weird---have to put this higher on my "to read" list to find out for sure!), whether from a mugger in a dark alley or extinction from the stars. Not that many characters actually die in Ligotti's dream-like stories, for example, an important factor making his work lean to "the weird". I believe it is a balancing act of elements which contribute to one book being called "weird" and another simply "horror". Am I on the right track or is there a fatal flaw here that I'm blind to? I think most of the books on this list are "weird" but not horror per se, many are simply well-written and unusual crime novels like The Screaming Mimi, The Deadly Percheron, The Crooked Hinge and Master of the Day of Judgment.

I'm going to come right out and say that although I enjoyed the majority of the books on the list, I didn't find many of them all that scary (some had their moments, but few made me feel unsafe alone in a room or had me looking over my shoulder, which--let's face it--is the benchmark of horror) and when I say this. I believe you have to be an almost saintly, all-loving person to read a post apocalyptic book, for instance, and think "wow, wouldn't it be scary if everyone suddenly died"? Most writers simply lack the ability to convey this to the reader in a way that has any impact and so we settle for slighter entertainments of the plot-driven, character oriented variety and very serviceable they can be, too. This list is filled with many of these "entertainments" and I found them well more than slightly entertaining in most cases but it (mostly) ain't art.

[Murony_Pyre]

I would like to add my order of enjoyment of the Ryan novels on the list (I have read 2 others besides) are as follows:

1. Echo of a Curse, which is far superior to the other two
2. The Subjugated Beast, Poesque on the psychological tip and pretty well done, if "workman-like"
3. Freak Museum, a huge disappointment after reading the other two

Curiously (perhaps not) this is the very order I read them in. So, my advice to those soldering through the "39 list" would be obviously to read them in the opposite order.

[Druidic]

I think Murony is right to draw a distinction between the weird and the horrific. Wagner was, after all, an apparent fan of the Weird Menace tales written by Cave and others, and there's a strong criminal element in many of those stories. I've never cared for Cave's work so one could say I have a 'blind spot' there.
I'm half damn blind these days anyway!

That 39 list bugs me in certain respects. I can't help but feel KEW was indulging in a bit of "try and track this rarity down all you completist horror fiction fans!" There are some potent works in there (well, enough so that the list overall isn't wholly incredible) but it's so far left-field at times as to be an exercise in leg-pulling and obscurity for its own sake.

Perhaps I'm overstating the case because I once spent a dull afternoon thanks to the 39 list reading R.R. Ryan in the British Museum and kept wishing I'd gone and done something else---anything else. And as for The Burning Court---well, if anyone wants my copy they're welcome to it. I've tried and failed three times to see its merits.

Mark S.

[Druidic]

Mark’s absolutely right, the list reads like a selection of rarities. That would certainly be valid; but why then are popular titles like Falling Angel and Psycho included as well as Carr’s books which are still easily available at very cheap prices? Wagner enjoyed dark psycho-sexual crime novels more than I do and that’s reflected in some of the choices. It’s all legitimate but a bit confusing. I take lists seriously: if I put together a list of the 10 Greatest Horror Novels there would be few surprises. A list of obscure and undeservedly forgotten works is something different…

[Druidic]

Wagner's list reminds me of a time when the paperback racks of the local drugstores were king. I was eight when I begged my grandfather to buy me a copy of Avon's Cry Horror!, my introduction to Lovecraft thanks to some artist's superbly ghoulish cover. It didn't take much begging. Over time that same drugstore, less than a two block walk from my home, would forever warp my consciousness with titles like Voyage of the Space Beagle , Durrenmatt's The Pledge, Doctors Wear Scarlet , Werewolf of Paris, Ghouls in my Grave...Who needed Amazon? After a wintry day of shoveling out neighbors, my friend Ray and I would trek to the drugstore, find our treasures and return to read them while sipping Hot Chocolate. Honest labor never felt so rewarding!

There are pros and cons to the 2010s. On the one hand all the stuff on KEW's 39 list can be accessed and analysed now without luck (or serendipity) and vast expense. On the other all the paperback racks and a vast number of bookshops are vanishing. So it's kind of a trade-off in one sense: stumble (incredibly!) across a battered copy of RR Ryan's Freak Museum for a few bucks in a store during the 1980s that didn't know of its rarity or alternatively pick it up in the 2010s via an online internet resource that advises you it's recently been cheaply reprinted. Thing is, IMO, it wasn't really worth having in the first place. Its cache was solely its earlier unavailability.

I think any future motherlode of undiscovered classic weird fiction (I mean undiscovered in the Anglophone countries) from the past is going to lie in untranslated stuff. The discovery of, say, other stellar imaginative authors like Stefan Grabinski or Dino Buzzati in Europe (or perhaps the likes of a Leopoldo Lugones or a Horacio Quiroga in South America) is far more likely than finding another Lovecraft buried in the pulps. So too, here in England, as far as inglorious Miltons of the past go, we're almost certainly all played out.

Mark S.