At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

I have double-locked the door and put the chair against it, with its weight against the handle. Nothing is getting in that way tonight. And yet the slithering is getting louder, and the cry of ‘listen’ is getting louder too, and all along I can’t help feeling that this is bad, this is very very bad, this is rău, rău!, there is nothing I can do to stop this, listen, listen, it is coming it is coming it is co

(yes that's where the main narrative ends).

this is rău, rău

ah but!

Notes by Dr Frances Scott

Director of Acute Inpatient Mental Health Services, Maudsley Hospital

The preceding document was found on the desk of a 58-year-old man, Professor Merritt Watkins, who is now a patient in my care.

oh yeah that last bit was part of the diary too wasn't it? lol at him writing in his diary right up until the last minute while the rău-rău stuff was going down.

and it was all a dream

i think Dawkins might have a case for libel here maybe

Professor Watkins has been my patient for three months. He responds to sedation but not to other forms of treatment and is docile for much of the time but is still prone to visual and auditory hallucinations. As sudden onset psychotic illnesses go, it is an unusually abrupt and fully developed case but not an unprecedented one. The prognosis is guarded to poor.

i'm assuming that last bit - 'guarded to poor' - is a thing that doctor's say. 'guarded' seems a bit weird. 'i am being guarded in what I say' yes, but a medical prognosis? don't feel lanchester wd get this wrong tho.

hahaha I had thought the previous bit was the end

fucking hell the end bit really veers off into wtf territory.

One symptom in this case is, to my knowledge, unique. The professor, however heavily sedated, cannot bear to be in the presence of any kind of paper with writing on it. This psychosis immediately had the most florid manifestations. His symptom is triggered by the merest fragment of script on a postcard, is worse with anything printed, and is unbearably acute whenever he catches a glimpse of a book. The staff here have to go to great lengths to avoid this happening, because the distress it induces in the patient is both intense and long-lasting. It manifests itself in one particular symptom: he puts his fingers in his ears and starts shouting. He always yells the same set phrases escalating in volume until he has to be restrained and forcibly sedated. ‘I can’t hear you,’ he shouts, as if to the book. ‘I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you. You are inaudible.’

so hang on. is this all a comment on audio books? that 'you are inaudible' is really making me pull a face.

whoomp there it is.

really really bad.

that last bit is like drinking a disgusting cup of coffee.

it would disgrace a third rate tales of the unexpected

i don't know if it's meant to be a moral, or a shaggy dog story punchline. Neither option stands up to any scrutiny.

no exactly. it has the tone of both.

ghost stories and this sort of i'm going to say 'sly wit' but ykwim don't make for good bedfellows

and it's interesting you mention Myles, wins, because i was reading some of O'Dolan's pre-Myles student stuff recently. and it's not really very much like his later stuff, relatively factual - actual student reporting - and fairly underdeveloped in terms of his later style, but it's still got it, whatever 'it' is. he's got a tense capable eye and a great ear.

regarding that 'door'/'wooden frame' thing (which implies that there is an *empty* wooden frame. one of the remarkable things about lanchester is the way he can be extraordinarily lazy in some respects but at other times really takes the long and laboured way round.

it's clearly meant to be a punchline (probably a moral too) but it's obviously not funny, or witty, or clever. its not even a pun of any kind.

nothing about that end gestures towards anything in the story (sokal type meets count magnus). it’s just “u listened to an audiobook” and at the end he was just listening to the conference feed. nothing really precedes anything. capital was a bit like that too, and his sentences are scrambled by a parallel cause-effect problem.

Even ignoring everything else, as a straightforward James pastiche/homage it doesn't work. The monster itself doesn't do it for me - too clearly described or too gory? Not sure, this could be personal taste, I've never found anyone (e.g. Le Fanu) who can spook me like James. But the mechanism and the moral, these are confused and unclear. Is Vlad coming after our man because he was uncouth enough to do some 4g downloading in the presence of Vlad's grave, or because he is a smug & blinkered know-it-all? With James it would be one or the other (and unlikely the latter, his demons rarely have such fine grained morality, either being straightforwardly retributive, punishing the merely curious, or simply arbitrary). If the former, well, why? What is Vlad's problem with 4g? James doesn't always offer explanations like that but when he does they are usually clear & simple.

It's got a strong whiff of Aickman about it, too - but where Aickman (and James) grant space and allow the unknown and the abject to invade and colonise, Lanchester seems to want to overpopulate - with daft gewgaws and pointless repetition.

I found my old GameCube at Christmas and keep reading "Listen" as Link's fairy.

This whole story belongs in Thog's Masterclass: http://thog.org/thogmatic.php

also, i'm wondering whether US documentary journalism has something to do with it:

“On a pancake-flat stretch of land not far from the Mississippi River, Illinois farmer Jerry Gaffner thumbs through weather forecasts and crop reports on his tablet computer, searching for clues about when to market his soybean crop.

A Ghost Story, now available as a podcast - read by Toby Jones: https://www.lrb.co.uk/audio-and-video

Berberian Sound Studio, it ain't.

oh no.

‘Listen...’

Damn, just came here to post that link to ruin Fizzles life, but was beaten to it. https://media.lrb.co.uk/lanc01_4001_01.mp3

New story:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n15/john-lanchester/love-island

John Lanchester’s new novel, The Wall, is coming out early next year.

I predict a coronary for Fizzles in 2019.

a story called "Love Island" is so perfectly Lanchesterian at this point that my involuntary groan of "you fucker" was tempered with a grin

is he aware of the tv show y/n

of course he is he is the Charlie Brooker of polite Brit lit fic only without the wild imagination ability to rehash old SF plots

skimmed it but the story does seem to be a direct satire of some description

much needed to be sure

i like how mary-kay wilmers is handing over larger and larger chunks of her beloved magazine's real estate to more and more awful writing, it's the right way to turn 80 imo

i've now read it

it's basically Lanchester's rejected Black Mirror script

oh man. you know there's a twist coming but aw jeez. i have to sit down.

oh god i’ve just seen this. i need to lie down.

lol hadn’t read ledge’s commmet before i posted that.

Some time I should read through the whole of Fizzles' critique of Lanchester. It was fun.

I wonder if being allowed to publish his awful fiction is a condition of his giving them his otherwise decent journalism.

Everything about the bed, the clean low modern furniture, the white painted walls, the angled light coming in through the edges of the blackout blinds – it was all crisp and distinct. She stretched and yawned and put her feet on the bare but warm floor. She was wearing her second-best sleeping shorts and some long-forgotten ex’s heavily faded Ramones T-shirt. It was a low bed, the kind that older people find it hard to straighten up from. But Iona was not old. Her mouth tasted fresh. She couldn’t smell her own breath, nobody can, but she could tell that if she were able to, it would smell sweet. The bathroom was en suite.

i am not really a fan of his journalism either tbh

"She couldn’t name three of their albums, nobody can, but she could tell that if she were able to, the names would be correct. The bathroom was en suite."

O_0

there are no heavily faded Ramones T-shirts (put the correct T in there just for you mark) in the wild now, surely?

i am not really a fan of his journalism either tbh

Yeah, I found Whoops! a slog, and always assumed it was me being thick about basic economics. But looking back, the writing is dire (and I'm still thick about economics).

The first two sentences of this are classic Lanchester, saying the same thing twice, boringly

When Iona woke up in the house she knew where she was straightaway, and she knew she was alone. There was none of that blurry intermediate state of semi-consciousness that people usually get when they’re in an unfamiliar place.

He truly is the Colley Cibber of our age

That para Matt posted is abominable.