I'm annoyed

‘I want you to help me escape,’ Eric said quietly, holding the tuna-fish-salad sandwich in his hands lightly, as if were delicate.

Surely this opening sentence of chapter fifty-two in the 1994 Harper Collins paperback edition should say ‘as if it were delicate’?

Strangely, such careless proof-checking is not the most annoying thing about The Dice Man. The most annoying thing is that, thus far, he seems to me to be a great big childish bell-end. I don’t use the word childish here in the sense of ‘open to the wonder of everything that surrounds us and exquisitely devoid of the neuroses and inhibitions that tend to accumulate with age.’ I use it in the sense of ‘does really fucking dumb things.’ Bell-end is a less ambiguous term, which I have never knowingly used as a compliment.

Maybe I’ll feel differently when I’ve finished the book, but if I met Luke Rhinehart in real life I would just think he’s an incredible arse.  He seems led by his cock like some shallow cliché of masculinity and some of the options he gives the dice are the sort of thing you might only come up with at the messy end of a drinking game. I say this as a largely post-sex old git. Maybe my younger would have viewed him more positively? If so, that is just one more thing about my younger self that, with hindsight, seems a little embarrassing.

I’ve got rather more time for LR as a fictional character. I’m being entertained enjoyably by the story (though it’s less of a page-turner than plenty of other books I’ve read), my curiosity about his fate has been piqued, and I certainly owe him a debt of gratitude for invigorating my urge to write.

Seriously though, I don’t know much about the mechanics of publishing, but the book was first published in 1971. If that proofing error was in the first edition, they had 23 years to spot it before publishing my copy of the book. And if it wasn’t, well how hard can it be to copy text from an earlier edition and paste it into a later one?

In.Ex.Fuqing.Cusable.