Creator / John Langan

The bearded man, not the lobster.

John Paul Langan (born July 6, 1969) is a supernatural horror writer. He has been nominated for several awards and won one for his novel The Fisherman. He is primarily a short story writer, having written several collections of them, as well as essays on the topic of horror writing, although he has written two full-length novels (House of Windows in 2009, and the aforementioned novel The Fisherman, in 2016).

Many of his stories take place in and around New York state, with several stories taking place in a fictionalized version of New Paltz, NY, which he calls Huguenot. With The Fisherman/'s publication, Langan has been developing something of a mythos which several of his short stories link back to, some more directly than others.

As of January 2024, Langan is in the process of writing another story, The Cleaving Stone, which follows two students and two children of a professor who went missing a decade prior while searching for a mythical creature in the mountains of upstate New York. It is set in the same universe as The Fisherman, and involves the titular stone, which briefly appeared, and then just as suddenly disappeared, toward the end of The Fisherman.

Langan is not of any (known) relation to fellow horror writer Sarah Langan, although they are friends and she wrote the introduction to his collection Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies.

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Novels

• House Of Windows (2009)
• The Fisherman (2016)
• The Cleaving Stone (TBA)

Collections

• Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (2008)
  • "On Skua Island"
  • "Tutorial"
  • "Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of Purple Flowers"
  • "Laocöon, or The Singularity"
  • "Mr. Gaunt"

• The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (2013)
  • "Kids"
  • "How the Day Runs Down"
  • "Technicolor"
  • "The Wide, Carnivorous Sky"
  • "City of the Dog"
  • "The Shallows"
  • "The Revel"
  • "June, 1987. Hitchhiking. Mr. Norris."
  • "Mother of Stone"

• Sefira and Other Betrayals (2019)
  • "In Paris, in the Mouth of Kronos"
  • "The Third Always Beside You"
  • "The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn's Balloons"
  • "Bloom"
  • "Renfrew's Course"
  • "Bor Urus"
  • "At Home in the House of the Devil"

• Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies (2020)
  • "Sweetums"
  • "Hyphae"
  • "Muse"
  • "Zombies in Marysville"
  • "With Max Barry in the Nearer Precincts"
  • "Into the Darkness, Fearlessly"
  • "Children of the Fang"
  • "Episode Three: On the Great Plains, In the Snow"
  • "Tragōidia"
  • "Ymir"
  • "Irezumi"
  • "The Horn of the World's Ending"
  • "The Underground Economy"
  • "The Communion of Saints"
  • "Aphanisis"
  • "Gripped"
  • "Inundation"
  • "To See, To Be Seen"
  • "What You Do Not Bring Forth"
  • "Vista"
  • "Slippage"

• Corpsemouth And Other Autobiographies (2022)
  • "Kore"
  • "Homemade Monsters"
  • "The Open Mouth of Charybdis"
  • "Shadow and Thirst"
  • "Corpsemouth"
  • "Anchor"
  • "Outside the House, Watching for the Crows"
  • "What Is Lost, What Is Given Away"
  • "The Supplement"
  • "Mirror Fishing"
  • "Caoineadh"

Short stories

• "On Skua Island" (2001)
• "Mr. Gaunt" (2002)
• "Tutorial" (2003)
• "Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of Purple Flowers" (2007)
• "Kids" (2008)
• "How the Day Runs Down" (2008)
• "Laocöon, or, The Singularity" (2008)
• "Lost in the Dark" (2017)
• "Technicolor" (2009)
• "The Wide, Carnivorous Sky" (2009)
• "City of the dog" (2010)
• "Deep Sea Swell" (2018)
• "The Shallows" (2010)
• "The Revel" (2010)
• "In Paris, in the Mouth of Kronos" (2011)
• "The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn's Balloons" (2011)
• "The Third Always Beside You" (2011)
• "Renfrew's Course" (2012)
• "Bloom" (2012)
• "Sweetums" (2012)
• "Hyphae" (2012)
• "With Max Barry in the Nearer Precincts" (2013)
• "Mother of Stone" (2013)
• "June, 1987. Hitchhiking. Mr. Norris" (2013)
• "Children of the Fang" (2014)
• "Episode Three: On the Great Plains, in the Snow" (2014)
• "To See, to Be Seen" (2016)
• “Sweet Angie Tailor in: Subterranean Showdown” (2017)
• “My Father, Dr. Frankenstein” (2017)
• “Haak” (2018)
• “A Partial List of Monsters, Scenes, and Adverbs That Will Not Appear in My Next Story” (2018)
• “At Home in the House of the Devil” (2019)
• “Natalia, Queen of the Hungry Dogs” (2019)
• “Oscar Returns from the Dead, Prophesizing” (2019)
• “Altered Beast, Altered Me” (2020)
• “Second Front” (2020)
• “Alice’s Rebellion” (2020)
• “Helioforge” (2021)
• “El” (2021)
• “Something Like Living Creatures” (2021)
• "If Wishes Were” (2021)
• “Future and Once” (2022)
• “Enough for Hunger and Enough for Hate” (2022)
• “A Late Encounter Beside the Chocolate Fountain” (2022)
• “Applicatio” (2023)
• “After Words” (2023)

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This author's works include examples of:

• Addictive Magic: The titular Supplement in "The Supplement", a book created from razor-thin slices of Odin's lost eye that allows its users to traverse time and space, or simply to live out better ways their lives may have gone. However, the book requires the user to give up significant amounts of their lifeforce to enable it to work.
• After the End: "Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of Purple Flowers" and "The Shallows" both take place after different apocalypses - one in which a plague has resulted in purple flowers growing from people's corpses and the appearance of a pack of unnaturally persistent and aggressive canine-like creatures, and one in which Lovecraft's Great Old Ones have arisen, respectively.
• Eldritch Location:
  • The Fisherman and several related short stories feature the world of the Black Ocean and the Black City, which is a parallel civilization built around arcane knowledge and practices. Time does not flow consistently in the other world, and the Ocean is home to both memory-copying fish-people and the gargantuan god-fish known as the Leviathan. The people of the Black City are also known to imprison their criminals in bigger-on-the-inside prison towers that wander both space and time.
  • In the same setting, Dutchman's Creek in upstate New York is a spot where the border between the two worlds runs thin. Travelers to the area can hear the voices of the dead (although it's ambiguous if it's actually the dead or just a sort of reflection of the listener's subconscious guilt manifested externally by the Black Ocean), and sometimes, especially during massive storms, wander into the other world.
• Evil Sorcerer:
  • While it might be a bit tough to call him evil, the titular angry, single-minded sorcerer with no regard for the collateral damage his pursuit of his goal creates features prominently in The Fisherman.
  • A petty, vindictive, and all-around unpleasant sorcerer, George Farange, features in "Mr. Gaunt" and "The Supplement". By the time of "The Supplement", George's nephew Henry appears to be well on his way to becoming a ruthless sorcerer as well, although seemingly a bit nicer.
  • Also ambiguously, Michael Renfrew, the titular sorcerer of "Renfrew’s Course", who offers to teach those who follow a special trail around his keep. The catch is, they must choose to sacrifice someone else, wiping that person from existence so completely not even their memory remains.
• Formulaic Magic: In the mythos, magic has both occult and mathematical aspects. In "What Is Lost, What Is Given Away", a well-liked math teacher claims a senior sorcerer of the Friends of Borges told him he was one of the best students the sorcerer had ever had. That same teacher is imprisoned in an extradimensional pocket that shrinks each time he attempts to escape, requiring him to study more occult math to dispel it.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: In "Mother of Stone" and "To See, To Be Seen", both set in the Black Ocean universe, gods are believed to require the support of their followers as a form of sustenance. In "Mother of Stone", the titular goddess's anger and her need for followers, living or dead, is the driver of the story's conflict. In "To See, To Be Seen", the situation is more ambiguous—a researcher with the Friends of Borges suspects this is the case for the entity the protagonist witnesses, but it's just in-universe speculation.
• Magic Is Evil: Or least very nasty to use. Magic, while essentially an esoteric science in the Black Ocean universe, is rather terrifying and grim, and only seen used by sorcerers who at best could be called amoral. Spells can be enhanced with human sacrifice, and a journeyman sorcerer tells one of the protagonists the "blood of the innocent"—in those exact terms—can be used to strengthen magical weapons.
• Magical Society: The Friends of Borges, a ruthlessly amoral occult research group composed of both powerful sorcerers able to manipulate space and time, and Muggles who want to research other planes no matter the cost.
• Our Demons Are Different: The demons in "Sefira" are, despite their hideous forms, very insect-like, can be bound by contracts, and originate from a hellish plane of existence known as the "Broken Plane". Their world is linked to our world in the sense that massive disasters, like extinction-level meteorite impacts, cause disasters on the Broken Plane—if this wasn't bad enough, time moves far, far slower there, meaning that upheavals that last centuries on Earth last countless millions of years there. As a result, demons are in perpetual pain and agony in their world, causing them to try and flee to our world through deceiving mortals, eating their souls to remain here.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Two of Langan's works feature very different vampires
  • In "The Wide, Carnivorous Sky", the telepathic vampire descends from its low-orbit coffin during the day and hurries to return before night falls. It may or may not be an alien or ancient inhabitant of Earth.
  • Stories set in the Black Ocean universe feature or refer to the Night Watch, an elite police force of the arcane Black City who become something like shadowy-vampire creatures via a ritual wherein they take death and the concept of darkness into themselves.
• Ret-Gone: The "price of tuition" that Renfrew's students must pay in "Renfrew's Course", as both the students themselves and their sacrifices are retroactively wiped from their earthly existence.
• Town with a Dark Secret: In "City of the Dog", Albany, NY has a secret history that dates back to the time of Greek myth.
• The 'Verse: Several of Langan's stories, namely The Fisherman, House of Windows, "Mother of Stone", "Corpsemouth", "Mr. Gaunt", "The Supplement", "What Is Lost, What Is Given Away", "To See, To Be Seen", "Anchor", "Lost in the Dark", and "Bor Urus" take place in the same setting, with references to the Black City, the Black Ocean, and sometimes the city's police force. Possibly including "Renfrew's Course", which makes reference to the sorcerer as being the author of Lovecraft's 'De Vermis Mysteriis', a work that George Farange is also mentioned as having translated.
• Was Once a Man: The fate of Carson in "Anchor", after killing the Guardian and eating its hearts in an attempt to end its pursuit for good.