Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover John Langan’s “Errata,” first published on his blog in December 2018, and now available in his new Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions collection. Spoilers ahead!
Writer John Langan acknowledges that most readers are “pretty forgiving” of errors that slip past proofreaders (and himsel…
Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover John Langan’s “Errata,” first published on his blog in December 2018, and now available in his new Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions collection. Spoilers ahead!
Writer John Langan acknowledges that most readers are “pretty forgiving” of errors that slip past proofreaders (and himself). Inevitably, someone does send him an email to point out, say, the difference between “principal” and “principle.” Maybe they delight in correcting an English teacher or are English teachers themselves. But the weirdest email concerns his novel, The Fisherman. Mr. Jyotisha of Seattle complains that page 85 of the book is indecipherable. It’s “an utter and absolute disgrace” that whoever laid out that page layered the text atop an unrelated page of printed material!
The attached photograph indeed shows Langan’s text superimposed on a jumble of words and images. Elongated rune-like characters intersect with his words, pulling them “into bizarre, semi-abstract patterns like pictographs.” Scattered sets of concentric rings seem to “bend [his words] into one another, blending them into strange new lexemes.”
He checks his copy of The Fisherman, which is fine. The best move, he decides, is to forward Jyotisha’s email to his publisher, Ross Lockhart, who can send the discommoded reader another Fisherman. When Langan gets no response from Lockhart or Jyotisha, he assumes the matter’s been settled. Two years later, he has cause to look for Jyotisha’s email. He’s reading another of Ross’s publications, Orrin Grey’s Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales, for a review in Locus. All’s terrific until page 94, on which Grey’s text floats atop elongated rune-like words and a congeries of concentric circles that distort it out of meaning.
Langan can’t find the email with the attached Fisherman page. He must have inadvertently deleted it. He emails Lockhart about Guignol and gets an immediate response inviting Langan to Skype. Right off, their connection’s sketchy. A buzzing echo makes Lockhart hard to understand. The video stalls. Feedback threatens to “cohere into a sentence in a deep, rasping tongue.” When the connection resolves, it’s clear Langan’s missed something—Lockhart is in the middle of a sentence that ends in “—from that church, or the one he found in the crypt beneath it.” More digital noise and video stalling. Lockhart’s face is caught between “manic laughter or rage,” then he’s saying, “Because Norway doesn’t have a formal extradition policy with the US, so he thought he’d be safe there. You can file that one under irony.”
Huh?
Lockhart continues: When he left to start Word Horde, he still didn’t believe what an unspecified “he” had told him. One night before he quit working for “the two of [an unspecified] them,” he saw a face staring through the window, which was impossible since his office was on the fourth floor. A face, or maybe a mask, paper or vellum, its surface faded and dirt-smeared, with moss growing on one cheek and into one eye. The other eye was cloudy, the face wrinkled –
More buzzing, more video freeze. At last, Lockhart returns, saying, “—with a sacred book, any kind of textual mistake would have a real world effect. Think of this thing as a kind of errata made flesh or… whatever.” Or was the face a trick of the light? Even if Lockhart did wonder whether [an unspecified] Jason’s story was true, he assumed he was safe. Jason was the one who removed the page from the book, not Lockhart, but somehow Jason transferred “the thing” to him, maybe in a buried clause in Lockhart’s exit paperwork? More audio and visual interference. Lockhart, again intelligible, talking about how he decided to “disperse it,” spread among many books. The effects on the reader would be negligible as long as they were exposed to only one of the “exits.”
Though Langan’s struggling to piece together Lockhart’s fragmented tale, he’s chilled. What if someone saw two “exits”? Well, Lockhart admits, it would be a problem, because each successive exit has an exponential effect over the previous one…
At that point, Langan’s closet bursts open as books stored inside topple out. The avalanche drags down a pair of pants and a shirt that sprawl like a headless figure. His tablet screen goes black. Just before Lockhart cuts out, he says, “I’m really sorry.”
The tablet’s dead, its circuits fried. Despite many attempts, Langan can’t reach Lockhart. Nor can he hunt down Jyotisha. He shelves Grey’s book unfinished, afraid to open it again.
Two nights after the Skype session, he sees a face in his bathroom window, the same one Lockhart described, though Lockhart didn’t mention its expression of tremendous rage and hatred. A moment, and the face is gone, but shock sends Langan hurtling from the bathroom. Shortly afterwards, Locus requests him to review some books forthcoming from Word Horde. Something thumps outside his office door, but when he checks, heart in throat, nothing is there.
As eagerly as Langan has looked forward to one of the offered titles, he must pass.
Buy the Book
Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions
John Langan
Thirteen tales of cosmic horror
Libronomicon: Such a bookshelf this weekend. Langan’s The Fisherman, Orrin Grey’s Guignol and Other Sardonic Tales, Laird Barron’s Occultation, M.R. James’s Selected Stories, Carrie Laben’s A Hawk in the Woods (unnamed but identifiable)… and whatever “sacred book” included a typo that produced the face.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Is that shape in the window a face? What words congeal out of the static of a bad connection? Do fallen clothes form a “flat, headless figure” lunging out of the closet, or is that just pareidolia? And is any of this a good excuse for going to bed without doing the dishes?
Ruthanna’s Commentary
“Errata” combines three great tastes: tech horror, scary tomes, and found footage. I’ve been reading Chris Hayes’ The Siren’s Call, about the horror of attention-thieving tech, so am in just the right mood. There’s nothing like a little light non-fiction to make fiction(?) feel all-too-plausible. Or to make you nervous every time there’s lag on a video call. Maybe something in the dropped sound would make the half-heard message more reassuring. Or maybe not.
It’s been a long time since we had any reason to think that most “content providers” had our well-being, or even our value-neutral entertainment, at heart. But book publishers—a book should still be old-fashioned, a happy relic of long attention spans and narrative immersion. Then again, someone had to copy over the Necronomicon and the Pnakotic manuscripts so that they remain readable in the Miskatonic library.
A story about these things can induce chills. A story about a story, though, can go one of two ways. Either it gets you the exasperating distance of Lovecraft’s worst “I found a letter about someone who heard a rumor” formats—or it brings the story closer. We know what to make of a campfire tale, however first person. But a discussion board, a bibliography, an artist bio, or a funny story about publication woes, suggest that the reader, too, could turn the wrong corner and encounter the thing direct.
Errata is the success mode. It’s just an explanation of something that went wrong during the publication of Langan’s own The Fisherman. Or maybe it’s an excuse for not having gotten around to blurbing Orrin Grey’s Guignol and Other Sardonic Tales. As someone who currently owes a couple of blurbs on things I have, in fact, enjoyed, I sympathize. (I can report that there are no crowd-distributed evil tombs in K.J. Charles’s How to Fake It in Society. Or at least not in *my *copy.) It’s full of real books, real authors and publishers. In good weird tradition, it places Langan’s collaborators in the path of terrible fates. Not to mention you, the reader currently reading this explanation in a book from Word Horde. The next page might easily contain an “exit.”
Which brings us back to technology. Like the videos in “Mammoth” or the large language model in “Cartesiana,” there’s no guarantee that an ebook will stay as you left it. If publishers can correct errors and remove art without your permission, they could just as easily disperse their Things Man Wasn’t Meant to Know throughout your e-reader. They claim to be diffusing the harm; they’re really looking to diffuse responsibility. No one could blame them, right? Or at least, no one could get around to it before seeing that face and going mad. It’s not like their own sanity can be openly crowdfunded.
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Anne’s Commentary
The first thing I did after reading this story was to check page 85 of my copy of The Fisherman. I was relieved to find it free of any palimpsestic undertext; the novel is one of the most deeply frightening I’ve ever read, hence a top favorite. My copy being untainted, I won’t need to burn it with appropriate cleansing rituals. It does, however, stand on a bookshelf cover-to-cover with the collected tales of M. R. James. On its other side is Arkham House’s The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, by Lovecraft and collaborators. I hope that combination of guardian volumes will suffice to keep The Fisherman safe.
I did make the mistake of letting journalist buddy Carl Kolchak read “Errata.” He immediately hit his laptop and before long triumphantly hooted that THIS was no FICTION. [Author’s note: Every last capitalization below is Carl’s, not mine.] Not only does Langan feature himself BY NAME, he boldly refuses to go at all roman à clef with the other people he mentions. Ross Lockhart IS the publisher of Word Horde, which is a REAL small press. In 2016, Word Horde DID publish The Fisherman, a REAL novel by the REAL John Langan, which at 282 pages DOES have a page 85. The other Word Horde books, Orrin Grey’s Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales and a first novel by Carrie Laben (A Hawk in the Woods), are REAL. Moreover, Guignol WAS published in 2018, just when Langan says he was reviewing it for Locus, a REAL magazine. Laben’s debut was published in 2019, which date fits with Locus’s offer for Langan to review it. And, in fact, Langan didn’t FORMALLY review A Hawk, but DID mention it favorably in his “2019 in Review” article for Locus.
Langan says he searched for the email sender who started this mess, without results. Carl’s own search unearthed no Mr. Jyotishas either. BTW, Carl enlightened me, Jyotisha is a Hindu system of astrology and astronomy, and certain surnames ARE derived from the Sanskrit word Jyotishi or astrologer (the common one being Joshi plus variants.) [Ruthanna: Ohhhhhhhhhhh.]
Also, Jyotisha means “the knowledge of light.” GET it? Langan’s correspondent was probably using Jyotisha as a SOCIAL MEDIA PSEUDONYM, from which Carl infers that Mr. J. actually KNEW what the undertext was about. Maybe MR. J. is the one responsible for page 85. Or maybe he’s trying to TIP OFF Langan to its dangers.
The Skype call to Ross Lockhart: Who or WHAT was masking critical parts of Lockhart’s conversation with static, feedback, video freezes? Probably it was the SAME person or THING that ultimately fried the circuits of Langan’s tablet. Lockhart’s started explaining the undertext situation, but Langan can only make out these bits:
“…from that church, or the one he found in the crypt beneath it.” So, SOMEONE took SOMETHING from a CHURCH or CRYPT, which caused so much trouble HE had to flee for safety to Norway. (CARL’S NOTE: Too bad the United States DID have an extradition treaty with Norway effective from March, 1980 through at least 2018. In fact, it had had formal treaties since 1893.) Hence the guy’s plight could be filed under “irony,” what with him remaining liable to extradition to the US, where he was doubtless suspected of some nefarious CRIME, though it could have been committed in self-defense or to save humanity from SUPERNATURAL THREATS, a situation Carl knows about from personal experience. Or maybe what was ironic was that he encountered something WORSE in Norway than in the US.
Seemingly unaware that Langan hasn’t heard much of his explanation, Lockhart says that when he left his previous position to start Word Horde, he ASSUMED he’d be OKAY. Besides, he didn’t believe what the Church/Crypt guy had told him.
Lockhart’s previous position, Carl ferreted out, was with Night Shade Books. Its founders, presumably the unnamed “two of them” Lockhart worked for, were founders Jason Williams and Jeremy Lassen. In 2013, faced with bankruptcy, Night Shade sold its assets, remaining an imprint under the new ownership. This JASON Williams must have been the one who told the story Lockhart didn’t believe. That could mean the CHURCH/CRYPT guy WASN’T the one who told Lockhart that incredible story.
MAYBE the Church/Crypt guy sold his stolen RELIGIOUS text to Night Shade. MAYBE Night Shade published this as fiction, but left out one page, the very one that would haunt the press until Night Shade passed on the curse to Word Horde through some buried clause in Lockhart’s termination paperwork. Lockhart thought he could “disperse” it by inserting the omitted PAGE into random individual books. This “palimpsest” page served as an interstitial “EXIT” dangerous to the reader only if they saw another of these EXITS. What were the odds one reader would come upon a second “palimpsest” page in a Word Horde book?
The ODDS were too good if the reader was a Word Horde editor or constant reviewer, like Lockhart and Langan! And what came through the EXITS was the PAGE itself, now transformed into a rotting vellum MASK OF FURY! At least early in EXIT EXPOSURE, the mask was separated from the cursed reader by window glass. But this ERRATUM grows exponentially more POTENT each time encountered! A CLEAR DANGER to anyone reading multiple Word Horde publications!
Carl concludes that THE PUBLIC MUST BE WARNED!
So far I haven’t convinced him that “Errata” is a joke between friends. According to the publication notes in Langan’s Lost in the Dark collection, the story originally appeared in Langan’s WordPress blog as a birthday present for Ross Lockhart.
Or, as Carl retorts en route to the door, a JOKE is what Langan wants the blissfully unawakened to think.
Me, I guess I’ll keep reading at my own risk.
Next week, we return unwillingly to the Greenlawn facility in Chapters 15-17 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster.