(Night) Winds Blowing for Kane – Toward a Karl Edward Wagner Revival by Brian Murphy As of this writing there are rumors—and more than rumor—of a Karl Edward Wagner revival, including his sword-and-sorcery/dark fantasy stories of Kane. I for welcome our immortal hero-villain overlord, and in the meantime encourage anyone who has not read the Kane stories to seek out the collection Night Winds. But first, evidence of a KEW comeback. 2020 saw the release of The Last Wolf, a wonderful documentary about Wagner’s life. The film covers the details of Wagner’s life, from his birth in 1945 to his untimely death in 1994, as told through a series of wide-ranging interviews with Wagner’s siblings, his ex-wife, childhood friends including John Mayer, and several horror and fantasy luminaries including the likes of Peter Straub, Dennis Etchison, Stephen Jones, David Drake, S.T. Joshi, and Ramsey Campbell, among others. We get everything from Karl’s precocious early days in the classroom as the youngest of four children in Wagner household, to his days as a medical student, breaking into writing, hanging out with the likes of Manly Wade Wellman, founding Carcosa Press, and tearing up the scene as a charismatic figure at fantasy and horror conventions. Recommended. Valancourt Books just reissued In a Lonely Place (1983), a classic collection of horror stories. This new edition includes all the stories from the original, plus an additional story, the author’s afterword from a crushingly expensive Scream Press limited edition, and a new introduction by Campbell, a multiple World and British Fantasy award winner and KEW fan. You can buy that now. The Warner paperback original regularly fetches more than $100 on the secondary market, so this is wonderful news. On the rumor-ish side, publisher Baen is reportedly laying the groundwork for a long-awaited reprint of the Kane stories. As I understand it, the estate holders have been approached and some tentative agreements are in process. This would be an enormous win for sword-and-sorcery fans, who have been deprived of good, reasonably priced print editions of these wonderful stories for far too long. Today you are limited to what I understand to be poorly edited Kindle editions, very expensive/out of print hardcovers by Centipede Press, or increasingly hard-to-find though still obtainable Warner paperbacks from the 70s/80s. I own the latter, and recommend the collection Night Winds...