Karl Edward Wagner's Morally Mature Sword and Sorcery

I just read the story, "Undertow," by Karl Edward Wagner, which I found in The Sword and Sorcery Anthology published by Tachyon Press, 2012. The story was original published in Whispers #10, August 1977. It is worthy example of sword and sorcery in that it relates a story structured by a sophisticated morality: at the end of the story, you cannot categorize categories as either "good" or "bad." Accordingly, it has a quality of tragedy about it in that you feel sorry for every character.

Generally speaking, I really enjoyed "Undertow." The fantasy setting is a dark city, lorded over by a sorcerer/swordsman, Kane. The protagonist is a girl who is cruelly claimed by Kane against her will. She hates him and wants to run away from, but his sorcery power is such that she is afraid to defy him. Kane continuously forces the girl to drink a strange potion, the function of which is a mystery for the whole of the story. At the very end, however, you realize that the potion was somewhat necessary for the girl's survival. In a strange way, her captor was preserving her. Hmm...

The ending haunted me because I didn't really know whose side I was on. Throughout the story, Kane is, for the most part, an absent character, a bogeyman talked about by people in low voices. Occasionally you get glimpses of him in flashbacks, but, for the most part, he is more legend than reality. The strangeness of the story's ending adds a level of moral complexity to the story. There is really no good or bad characters. They all make mistakes, they all have strange motivations, and they all suffer in this way or that.

This kind of moral complexity/maturity is an quality of sword and sorcery I've always admired. Sword and sorcery has a propensity to make the moral world of its fictional setting so many shades of gray as opposed to the black and white of epic fantasy.

I've haven't read much of Karl Edward Wagner's work before. If you don't now anything about him, let me briefly fill you in. One of his major accomplishments, from my perspective at least, was his publication of a three-volume set of the original Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E. Howard. He edited The Year's Best Horror Stories from 1980 until 1994, when he died from his battle with alcoholism.  Reading through his wikipedia article, he seemed like he was a pillar in the science fiction, fantasy, horror community as well as a prolific writer. Oh, and he wrote Conan pastiche, a novel about Conan's bucaneering days, Road of Kings (Bantam 1979).