Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,1

definition. What did define him was an instinctive generosity, a native compassion, his sense of humor, his capacity for observation, his alertness and the way it lay in wait, also the way these capacities very quickly declared themselves above the conventional forms of judgement. The other essentially defining matter, one which nearly always permeated and aerated Karl’s conversation, was the astonishing, dazzling, unprecedented, quantity of what he knew.

Karl was an enormously informed human being, and the range of his knowledge had several sources. During our first encounter in Peter’s Bar, I learned that he had finished medical school and qualified as a psychiatrist, which already meant that he was smarter than most people, as well as being more dedicated to those tasks he had decided were worthwhile.

To pause for a moment in which to state what should be obvious, it is not possible to advance through college, medical school, the demanding requirements of internship, residency and psychiatric training without a degree of application, intelligence, determination and sheer savvy not only beyond the comprehension of most people but actually unimaginable to them. Karl was entirely uninterested in claiming the recognition ordinarily due these achievements, and as far as I knew, never alluded to their intellectual or emotional cost. He simply wanted you to know what he had done on his journey toward becoming a writer because he knew that it informed his work.

Another aspect of his knowledge was made up of what he had read. Somehow, and here we must invoke those same capacities for intelligent, determined, savvy application which had seen him through his medical training, Karl had managed to read almost everything related to fantasy and horror literature published in the past three centuries. His erudition was extraordinarily profound and precise. A few years later, Karl did everyone the favor of sharing in his Fantasy Newsletter column some of what he knew about the European variants of horror’s tropes, forgotten writers, overlooked early stories, the publishing history and bibliographic information pertinent to these writers and their stories, and a lot more of the same. One knew there was a lot more where that came from, that Karl was drawing upon a deep well of such information.

It is almost impossible to suggest how impressive all of this was to anyone who had the good luck to come across Karl’s columns or provoke him into conversation about arcane horror literature. Anything but a show-off and a great deal more interested in talking about matters closer to hand, such as the merits of the beer in our pint glasses, the labyrinthine thought processes excited in him by whatever he had happened to have been doing that day, his entertaining fantasies about the strangers visible from his chair, the current state of Carcosa and its manifold sagas, the ever-fascinating subject of food, anecdotes about friends and recent visitors, animadversions about North Carolina and his curiosity as to these new people he was meeting, he had to be prodded into talking about the subject he undoubtedly knew in greater detail and breadth than anyone I’ve ever known.

But the most crucial, most central part of his knowledge had nothing to do with what he had learned during medical school, his psychiatric training or his unprecedented command of the history of supernatural and fantasy literature. To an extent well beyond the usual human capacity, even as represented by most fiction-writers, and it now seems to me to an extent so drastically uncomfortable as to be painful, Karl was able to see what was actually before him. This ability is nothing if not rare. Most people move through a fog of preconceptions, unconscious fantasies, Oedipal plots and ideational patterns that distorts the tiny portion of available reality they allow themselves to see into a form they already know. Karl wasn’t like that. In the days before he succeeded in numbing himself into something like a perpetual state of grumpy, amused, self-medicated ease, he was one of those people who take in the undercurrents and meanings of what is going on around them. He didn’t miss anything. You could see it in his eyes, in the movements of the face hidden beneath the heroic beard, and you could hear it in every word he said. Truly observant and insightful human beings often strike everyone else as approaching daily life from an eccentric angle, and Karl must have accustomed himself early on to this sort of witless marginalization. I am tempted to ascribe the flowing hair and beard, the