THE DEEP ONES: "Where the Summer Ends" by Karl Edward Wagner

"Where the Summer Ends" by Karl Edward Wagner

Discussion begins December 8, 2021.

First published in Dark Forces 1980.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?43745

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Karl Edward Wagner: Masters of the Weird Tale
The American Fantasy Tradition
In a Lonely Place
Nightmares in Dixie: Thirteen Horror Tales from the American South

ONLINE VERSIONS

No online versions found to date.

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

https://pseudopod.org/2017/09/15/pseudopod-560-where-the-summer-ends/

MISCELLANY

https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/local/2021/10/30/karl-edward-wagner-knoxvill...
https://bookandfilmglobe.com/film/documentary/last-wolf-karl-edward-wagner/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Edward_Wagner
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/true-story-kudzu-vine-ate-south-18...
https://tinyurl.com/yc7m8aw6

I really liked this one, particularly the understated end.

Anyone know if Knoxville really was undergoing such extreme urban decay in c. 1980?

I wonder if this story is somehow responsible, despite the fact I’m pretty sure I’ve never read it before, for the impression I once had that kudzu is fictional.

I remember how much this story stood out from the others in the seminal Dark Forces anthology when it first came out. It certainly put KEW on the horror map for me in a big way. Using the invasive kudzu weed is a brilliant idea and Wagner also shows a masterful touch in evoking the blighted and blasted Knoxville setting.

I've added a Smithsonian article about kudzu under Miscellany. It kind of shoots down the many myths about the weed, but I don't think it detracts from the story. Kudzu is still there, after all, and who knows what it could actually conceal?

>3 AndreasJ:

Given Wagner's personal connection with Knoxville, I'm inclined to credit his depiction of it for the period.

>4 semdetenebre:

Interesting piece. If kudzu has made as big a literary impact as that suggests, my erroneous impression surely derived from some other work.

>5 paradoxosalpha:

Fair enough, though he may have been exaggerating for effect.

>3 AndreasJ:, >6 AndreasJ:

I didn't get the sense that the entire town was decrepit, merely that formerly posh areas near the university had fallen into decline, which is easy to imagine.

The creatures of this story had a real Machen Little People feel about them, although the importation from Asia was a distinction with a difference.

Rather than "understated" I found the ending pretty high-impact, like a jump scare that goes the extra step of pulling the seat out from under you.

>8 paradoxosalpha: Definitely a little people flavor like Machen's "The Red Hand", "The Shining Pyramid", "Novel of the Black Seal", and, for that matter, Wagner's own ".220 Swift" we looked it awhile back.

The menace here isn't in the wastelands of some rural area but the "waste-lots" of the city.

Thought Wagner ended this well and with a bang (well, two actually). I appreciated the nice bit of realistic big city politics with Gradie's and Morny's arson of abandoned buildings being winked at.

>8 paradoxosalpha:

It’s understated in the sense that KEW doesn’t tell us Mercer and Linda are done for, he just lets us work out the likely effect of two derringer bullets on hundreds of assailants who’ve just killed a man with a shotgun.

>8 paradoxosalpha:, >9 RandyStafford:

I was also reminded just a bit of Boucher's "They Bite", even though KEW's ".220 Swift" was probably a bit more akin. Still, the idea of being watched from the outside by massed malevolent entities carries through.

The torching of houses on abandoned lots reminded me of the insane situation in NYC in the mid to late 70s, when decrepit, crumbling buildings in the Bronx were commonly torched by their mostly absentee landlords for the insurance money. In this story it seems to be more of a service than a crime, however.

I haven't watched the documentary about Karl Edward Wagner, The Last Wolf, but I just watched a trailer on YouTube. An interviewee (I think it was Alan Jones - Alan Jones (3) as per the disambiguation notice) said something along the lines of "KEW had read everything, put it all into his stories, but made it his own".

That seems applicable to this story: the use of Kudzu, a "ripped from today's headlines" kind of idea, and the urban decay of late '70s Knoxville, seems quite Nigel Kneale-ish (for example, Quatermass and the Pit is a fountainhead of hybrid Science Fiction/Horror and Folk Horror ideas now, but the initial inspiration was the Notting Hill race riots that happened just a year or so before the first TV broadcast). Gradie's investigations into what had been imported with the Kudzu would have a more traditional M. R. Jamesian air if it hadn't been kept "offstage" until the very end of the story. I can imagine an alternative version with Gradie as the protagonist - that would perhaps have taken KEW into more Ramsey Campbell territory, in terms of storytelling.

Edited to add: Corrected "hydroid" to "hybrid".