The Fisherman
by John Langan
Summary
Abe lost his wife to cancer two years into the marriage, and fishing is what he did instead of drinking. Dan, younger, lost his wife and both sons in one car accident, and Abe teaches him the rod for the same reason. The frame of Langan's novel is the two widowers' quiet apprenticeship in survival, until Dan finds mention of Dutchman's Creek, a stream on no map, folded into the Catskills near the Ashokan Reservoir, and the fishing trips acquire a direction Abe mistrusts before he can say why.
The novel's center is a much older story, told to them over diner coffee as the rain comes down: the account of Der Fischer, a scholar sorcerer among the crews that built the reservoir a century ago, when New York drowned whole valley towns for its drinking water. In that buried valley, the story goes, the Fisherman conducted an angling of his own, his line cast into the black ocean that underlies the world, after the oldest catch there is, and the drowned towns' dead were his bait. Langan writes the inset tale at full novella length and gothic pressure, then returns his widowers to the creek that is its living residue, where the water offers each man exactly what he lost, on the hook where such offers are always fixed.
It is cosmic horror built on grief's actual mechanics, the willingness to pay anything for restoration.
Around two hundred and eighty pages.
Best for readers who want Lovecraft's ocean fished with Melville's patience, and the best weird novel of its decade about bereavement.
Historical Context & Significance
The Fisherman won the Bram Stoker Award for 2016, along with This Is Horror's novel of the year, and its slow tide was the story: published by the small press Word Horde, it spread reader to reader until it became the modern weird's consensus classic, the book handed across the counter when someone asks where the new cosmic horror is.
John Langan, a college instructor in the Hudson Valley whose home ground the book fishes, had been the movement's essayist and short form master; the novel confirmed the New Weird's maturation into something Lovecraft supplies vocabulary for but no longer governs, grief doing the work dread used to do alone.
The Ashokan history is real, New York City's reservoirs did drown a dozen Catskill communities, and the novel's fusion of that documented submersion with its black ocean has made it a fixture of the drowned town mythos.