The Fisherman

At the heart of John Langan’s The Fisherman (2016) which has just been awarded the prestigious Stoker Award by the Horror Writers Association, is a fundamental human emotion: grief and the desire to have one last sojourn with a deceased loved one to say all of the things that never got said when they were alive. If such was possible, what might be the price one would have to pay since life always proves there is no such thing as a free lunch?The Fisherman is a most original and creatively crafted novel. It opens with one of the most ominous and foreboding beginnings one is likely to encounter. The story to be revealed is described “as coal-black” and the narrator questions, “Can a story haunt you? Possess you?” However, a mere couple of pages later Langan moves his readers to an incredibly realistic tale describing a man, Abe, and his attempts to deal with the sudden and premature death of his wife, Marie, to cancer. Abe’s story is one to which any reader will relate who has suffered the loss of a loved one. Abe’s bereavement is revealed in an objective, yet movingly fashion without undue sentimentality. Abe eventually finds escape in fishing the streams in the Catskill Mountains of New York. At work, a colleague, Dan Drescher, has also suffered a loss: the death of his wife and two sons in an automobile accident. Abe cautiously and hesitantly reaches out to Dan and the two begin to share a friendship and moments of relief fishing together, until the ill-fated day that Dan suggests they seek out a little-known and isolated stream called Deutschman’s Creek—Dutchman’s Creek, created by the relocation of eleven and a half towns to form the Ashokan Reservoir in 1916. Abe and Dan’s lives will never be the same.The bulk of The Fisherman contains a narrative entitled “Der Fischer: A Tale of Terror.” It is a bizarre story told to Abe and Dan by a local by the name of Howard that chronicles the pernicious history of the area. It is also a heady stew of the ghostly and unknown, of the preternatural and incredible. For the reader it is like being given a dish one has never tasted before as the reader attempts to delineate possible ingredients. In “Der Fischer: A Tale of Terror,” as well as the novel as a whole, one can discern hints of William Hope Hodgson, Aleister Crowley, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Matthew J. Costello, Stephen King, and even Herman Melville (the latter of which is clearly evident), among others. This list, in no means, is meant to imply The Fisherman is a derived pastiche of other novels. What it does denote is The Fisherman is such an exceptional work that it stirs the imagination that will have the reader dipping into their bank of knowledge of other pieces of fiction with which they are familiar, seeking any kind of parallel to Langan’s creation.For what is a work of horror, The Fisherman is vastly literate, at times complex and filled with numerous characters and events although Abe and Dan are meant to be the focus at both the beginning and the end of the novel. It contains surprising beauty and repugnant evil, vivid visual and sensual details, a purposefully distorted vision of ancient mythology, and an ever present feeling of dread. The setting for most of the novel, considering the related events as well as many of the proceedings themselves, borders upon the surreal. Yet, behind it all there remains a surprising foundation of humanity.The last portion of The Fisherman focuses once again upon Abe and Dan and their terrifying, unworldly experiences at Dutchman’s Creek as Langan produces layer after layer of new dismaying fear for the main characters and the reader. Only after the novel’s climax is there a sense of relief, but it is a false one as Langan proves not to have run out of additional scares to recount.The Fisherman is the most mindboggling of novels. Readers are likely to retain some of the book’s images in their mind long after completing the novel and feel a sense of chill engulf them anew. The Fisherman is one of those rare novels that many readers, upon finishing it, will be tempted to start reading all over again with the suspicion that the novel contains much that will have been accidentally overlooked with just one reading.

Minor Spoilers AheadCosmic Horror is hit or miss for me. I adore Lovecraft, but I acknowledge that much of his writing suffers from a generic narrator (Male academic) and a vagueness of description ("A creature too terrible to describe"), deficiencies (In my opinion) that are still being emulated today. Of course, Cosmic Horror can be great despite the narrator, and when used well the vagueness of description can be effective and unsettling. Too often, however, I find that a lot of the Cosmic Horror I read falls into these trappings.Not so with The Fisherman. The main character (Abe) is well fleshed-out and relatable. I appreciated the frankness and honesty of the character as he walks us through the difficult period following the death of his young wife very shortly after their marriage. He is very honest with the reader about how the death affected him and how he behaved in the throes of grief. Mr. Langan does a wonderful job of creating a character the reader cares about.However, Abe's story merely bookends the real meat of the book. Abe begins to bond with a coworker, a recent widower (although under very different circumstances) through fishing. One rainy day they are in a near-deserted diner on their way to a new fishing hole when the chef/ owner decides to let them in on the dark history of their destination, Dutchman's Creek.From this point, the bulk of the book is told by the the diner's proprietor. It's a story he heard from a minister who heard it from an elderly woman in a nursing home who lived part of it decades ago and was told the rest by her husband. The story was compelling and I certainly enjoyed it, but it was jarring to drop Abe so abruptly and just as jarring to pick him back up a few hundred pages later. Furthermore, although Abe makes mention that the new narrator had mentioned having literary aspirations at some point in his life, it is a little hard to believe that he is able to narrate a 200+ page 3rd and 4th hand story from memory and with the flow and literary flourishes he does (Although I seem to remember Abe alluding to the fact that he hadn't told them everything in the story, they had just somehow intuited it).Despite this clunky narrative, the story itself is rich and interesting. The tale follows a German immigrant family in the pre-WW1 years who move to a town in Upstate New York to assist in the building of a reservoir. Things are going well until a woman the whole town saw trampled to death shows up, broken and damp but "alive", in her home. From here we are given fascinating and deep backstory on the cosmic forces at play, each chapter adding to the foreboding of what awaits the town and possibly the world.One of my favorite aspects in Cosmic Horror is when the author alludes to the historical anecdotes, myths and origins behind the great horror at the center of the book, such as when Lovecraft talks about the Mad Arab or the ancient pagan tribes that worship his dark gods. Mr. Langan does not disappoint in this respect, and I enjoyed the mentions, brief as they were, of the Ottoman and biblical angles on the story. Furthermore, I greatly enjoyed the voyage taken by the German protagonist and a colleague to a bizarre and otherworldly city. As I've said before, I find many in this genre to be frustratingly vague, but this brief portion of the book was done brilliantly and the possibilities it suggested really helped add to the story.This was a great book and Mr. Langan is clearly a gifted author. If not for the clunky narration, I would give this book 5 stars. Mr. Langan doesn't spell everything out, but is never unnecessarily vague or glib as I've found many in the genre to be.I really enjoyed the ending as well. Perfectly chilling.On a more practical note, I was impressed by the physical book itself. The front and back cover art are beautiful. The paper is thick and the ink is striking. I never comment or even notice these things but this is one well made book.