The Fisherman – An Emotionally Resonant Horror Fiction

“Maybe whoever, or whatever, is running the show isn’t so nice. Maybe he’s evil, or mad, or bored, disinterested. Maybe we’ve got everything completely wrong, everything, and if we could look through the mask, what we’d see would destroy us.”

John Langan’s The Fisherman (2016) was adorned with couple of adjectives – ‘Lovecraftian’ & ‘Literary Horror’ – that pushed me to go through it. Moreover, Mr. Langan was no stranger to horror writing, his spectacular talent is evident in his collection of weird horror tales titled, ‘The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies’ (haven’t yet read his first novel ‘House of Windows’.) Still, the aforementioned adjectives combined with other superlative ones like ‘transcendent’ or ‘cosmic horror’ has become such a cliché nowadays that I also had some skepticism in approaching it. But the pathos and irony Langan employs to draw his bereaved characters easily pulled me in.

The Fisherman is set in the late 1990s, in the mountains of Catskills (in southeastern New York State) that’s punctuated with creeks often frequented by fisherman. The tale unfurls from the perspective of Abe (“Don’t call me Abraham; call me Abe. Though it’s what my ma named me, I’ve never liked Abraham”, our narrator says in the novel’s opening lines), a widower from small-town who is working for IBM. Married late in life to Marie, whom he lost her to cancer with which she was diagnosed shortly after their return from honeymoon, Abe now finds comfort only in fishing, a hobby he picked out of nowhere. Fishing has helped him to keep his job and ascend from the void of alcoholism. The six-feet-seven Dan is Abe’s co-worker, a young man with a wife and twin kids. What eventually brings these men together is not their work, but their grief. Dan loses his family to an accident and few months after Dan’s profound loss, Abe extends to him an invitation to go fishing together. Dan has had a remote interest due to the fishing trips with his father.  

Fishing with Abe, however, brings Dan a sort of peace or at least a distraction. Every weekend, the two men search for known as well as uncharted streams around Catskills areas to fish. One day, Dan proposes that they go to ‘Dutchman’s Creek’. A friendly cook named Howard of Herman’s Diner (surely a nod to H.P. Lovecraft and Melville) hearing about Abe & Dan’s plans warns them against going to the stream. He then tells a pretty long tale about strange events in a village in the beginning of 20^th century that was persecuted by a dark, mysterious force known as ‘Der Fisher’ aka ‘The Fisherman’. The village was later destroyed (the people displaced) to create a reservoir which is now called as the ‘Dutchman’s Creek’. The novel’s strongest second part chronicles the experiences of a Dutch immigrant named Rainer Schimdt, a former academic for some inscrutable reason works as a stone mason during the construction of reservoir. Part III follows Abe & Dan’s unsettling trip to the creek, where they encounter come across unreal and unfathomable things that promises to provide an easy solution to their loss.

John Langan

John Langan utilizes the conceit of nested stories very well, one restrained and realistic while the other is steeped in occult. It is interesting to note how the personal narratives of Abe & Dan intersect with a more expansive cultural and historical narrative. As for the ‘cosmic horror’ elements are concerned, Langan mostly gets it right as he doesn’t fully give into the temptation of explaining in detail the monsters’ physicality or its realm’s reality. Langan’s horrific imagery, conjured by his lively prose, does allow space for readers’ imagination to come up with their own image of the ‘unspeakable horror’. I also found it interesting how the Dutchman tale is not told when Howard recollects it. The story unfolds only when Abe sits and writes down what he heard at the diner. This leads to Abe later questioning if Howard has actually said all the things he has written. Hence a strange resonance forms between the two stories, which only deepens the work altogether.

While Lovecraft’s influence is plainly evident, Langan also frequently alludes to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Bible stories. The novel’s ruminative pace in the last part and the toying with language definitely lacks the thrills of the Rainer Schmidt story. Nevertheless, the author maintains the sense of emotional discomfort up until the final passages. Whether Langan is narrating the tale through Abe or Rainer or Jacob, he deeply deals with the issues of loss and grief so as to foreground the human experiences more than the preternatural incidents. Overall, The Fisherman is a grimly fascinating horror/adventure where insurmountable griefs cause as much damage as the luring dark forces.