The Fisherman

Jesus Christ... this book! I never realised I was in love with it until I finished it and couldn't stop thinking about it, dreaming about it. So I read it again. It is dark and beautiful and horrific and wonderful. I think I know a book's good when I struggle to find words for it, and I really struggle for words when it comes to The Fisherman. It's one of my favourite books I've read in a while, it's one of my favourite Weird Fic books I've read in a while, and it was just a wonderful and capivating read. Okay, I'm gushing. This is a book which has a lot to say and a lot of moods. It's horror, and it's horrific. It's weird fiction, and it's very damn weird. It's Lovecraftian, and boy does it love Lovecraft. It's dark fantasy, and it really is dark and it really is fantastical. And there are veins of human stories and human compassion, veins of straight-foreward adventure and pure fantasy, historical elements and personal elements... it's a mish-mash river of things which flow through the reader in a torrent. I felt this was a story Langan had been ruminating on for a long time, and urgently wanted, or had, to tell. I liked but never loved Langan's short stories, they were interesting but never spoke to me, and I ordered this book on a whim after seeing good reviews. I didn't expect to like it. The amount of dark enjoyment and sheer joy got from this floored me. I think in his short stories, Langan tries to be too clever, too weird and too subversive, because if he can write like he wrote in this book, he can *write*. This book really dragged me into it's world, and I loved it. So, I've gushed - a few things I didn't like. Firstly - Well, I'd have liked to know more about Rainer. I love Rainer, I'm invested in Rainer, I want the continued occult adventures of Rainer. He put all the other characters in the shade, more or less. Secondly, I hate to sound like a prude, but I work in a school library, and when I was 90% through the book I was thinking 'This would be a fantastic introduction to Weird Lit for young adults/older teens. I'd like to put this on our shelves, I have so many ideas about an initiative to get kids reading horror/sci-fi/weird-lit' and then...bam...detailed sex scene. Maybe we can still put it on our shelves, but...hmm... don't get me wrong, I'm in no way anti-sex scenes, it's just that it changed the book from being the perfect intro to sinister and scary Weird Lit for teens and young adults to something that I'd feel cautious about recommending to younger folks. Not a true complaint, just that I wish I could recommend it to my young library patrons. Third, I desperately want more. I know this is best as a stand-alone book. But I want so much more. Total score: 5/5 stars, or maybe 4.99/5 stars. Stunningly wonderful, but with tiny little complaints that are mostly just my personal comments. A lot of fun, and a hell of ride for a cosmic horror book.

If you’ve ever read a novel whose imagery stuck with you, seared hot into your brain, draining your sleep away, its vividness painted across your mind’s eye in a way that seems like a film streaming silently across the blacks of your eyelids every time you close them, then you have read a novel like John Langan’s The Fisherman. There are scenes in this novel, that are not only horrific in nature, but also linger in your thoughts wherever you go, like a wad of gum stuck to the sole of your shoe. Langan’s unorthodox narrative structure, his attention to detail, the weird surrealism of the events which take place, and the mysteries that the Dutchman’s Creek hold, are some of the most effective components of storytelling that we have read all year. The Fisherman is a machine, each component equally important, working together to grind the axles, gears, and cogs to breathe life into a mechanism of haunting language and execution. Deep within the heart of Langan’s novel, is the nature of grief and its effects on those who are the most emotionally vulnerable. What people are capable of when their reality is questioned, their fantasies realized. How grief can seep into one’s conscience, how it can transform someone, and perhaps most importantly (as we see with our protagonist Abe), how grief can be so powerful, we have to find a way to cope. A hobby, a sport, a distraction. Whatever is needed to keep sanity intact. Langan’s choice of words and his artistic rhythm keep our relationships with the main characters intimate, while also illustrating scenes of terror with a sharp and hallucinatory tongue. The Fisherman combines Weird Fiction and Literary Horror, brewing a cocktail of unsettling imagery and a premise that invokes curiosity and intrigue. Imagine the horrors of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” bred with the mysterious surrealism of Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and you have The Fisherman, an epic piece that treads the border between literary fiction and downright hair-raising horror. The novel reads like that of a classic, while maintaining the atmosphere of weird fiction that is, by all means, unforgettable. Langan pays homage to classics of literature, whether it be Herman Melville’s Moby Dick or the cosmic horrors of Lovecraft and the weird tales of authors like Machen and Algernon Blackwood. Where many authors fail to individualize their inspirations from their own writing, Langan succeeds triumphantly in setting his own work apart. It wouldn’t be right to compare The Fisherman to any other work. Its amalgamation of themes and motifs stretch far beyond the genre in which it is beheld, transcendent in its own storytelling while maintaining a course for originality all the way through. The history and depth in which Langan describes the tale that unfolds, spanning over many decades, is of an intricate and astute precision that modern authors should take notice to. A page turner if there ever was one, the reader is hooked from the opening chapter and it becomes rather impossible to put the book down. Each chapter ends alluding to a larger horror awaiting on the horizon, each section ending with newfound mystery that chains the rest of the novel together. In a climax that is both cinematic and hauntingly poetic, Langan ends The Fisherman with a paragraph that has become etched into the recesses of our minds, clinging to our thoughts, replaying again and again, each time sending new chills down our spines. Langan is a titan. That much is certain. This novel is his champion. The stakes and expectations for House of Windows are at an all-time high, and with the beauty that is The Fisherman, we know that it won’t disappoint. The Fisherman is one of the greatest horror novels to come out in the past decade, and it will continue to hold its precedence and importance for many years to come.

I don't get the high ratings. I couldn't connect with the characters and I'm finding it a boring book.

Gran exponente del cosmic horror contemporáneo. Lectura totalmente recomendable si te gusta el género. Pero...por qué demonios se empeñan en algunas ediciones en utilizar ese acabado gomoso/pegajoso en las tapas!? El polvo se adhiere a la superficie de tal manera que es imposible limpiarlo. Yo acabé forrándolo como los libros del colegio, qué remedio... Por lo demás, gran compra a un precio muy bueno

Having heard the name of John Langan mentioned multiple times wherever discussions of emotive, literary dark fiction occurred, yet having never read a word of his fiction, I was intensely curious - eager, perhaps - to sample what talents he was reputed to possess. When I saw the promos and cover for the - at the time I heard of it - forthcoming novel, The Fisherman, I knew I just had to get it and read it (partly this was also because of a lifelong love of the ocean and all things watery; I find stories - especially dark and horror stories - which revolve around the sea and water to be very evocative when done well). So I did. But what did I think? Well, read on and find out... First off, let me get this out of the way; this story is firmly in the tradition of the literary, the subtly emotive, the slow burn. Though you will find monsters and violence and true horror here, they are secondary to the main point of the story, which revolves around themes of grief, loss, love, friendship, depression, loss of purpose, and other, very human concerns. There is also a hefty dose of the portentous, of a deeply ingrained cosmic horror which pervades nearly the entire piece almost from beginning to end. It gives a sense of the epic to what is, ostensibly, a very intimate portrait of two friends trying to deal with grief in their own ways. I won't say too much about the plot, suffice it to recount that the book is narrated by Abe who has lost his wife. He details his feelings in beautifully written lines and passages, talks about finding some kind of way back through fishing, and tells us about Dan, who loses his wife and children to a car crash. It is Abe's attempts to provide Dan with a similar solace that sets the main wheels of the novel rolling. The book is divided into three parts (or two parts with one part smack in the middle of the other, if that makes more sense). The first part deals with, as I've said Abe's history, and then Abe and Dan's friendship, all of which is delivered in one of the most inviting, homely 'voices' I've read this side of Stephen King. Abe draws you in from the first line, immediately feeling like a fully realised, living, breathing person and it's wonderful. It makes reading the book that much more enjoyable, but also serves to really immerse you in the story and its details. It even manages to make fishing - an activity I'm ambivalent towards, at best - seem deeply therapeutic and desirable. It's obvious these sections are written by someone who either knows their subject inside out, or has researched way beyond the call of duty. Equally, those parts dealing with the feelings of grief indicate a writer who just *knows* (one way or the other) how it feels to lose someone, who is deeply empathetic of that immense pain; essentially, showing the insight that makes a great writer. This first section runs on, neither rushed nor laboured, until we start to get into the rather stand-offish friendship between Abe and Dan. For at this point in time, Dan's grief is too recent, too keen, and he is perhaps not quite ready for the therapeutic powers of fishing that have helped Abe. Yet he does respond in a way, except...where Abe finds a kind of solace in fishing, Dan's attraction to it seems to take him down a slightly darker path, especially when he discovers mention of a certain Dutchman's Creek in an obscure book on fishing spots. Something in this book - something he won't share with Abe - lights a sick fire within him to find this creek. And one day, on their way to find it, they stop at a diner and are told a long story about the history of that particular fishing spot. Now this is where the second part of the story comes in, a narrative within a narrative which is first recounted to Abe, then by Abe to us with apparently no loss of detail or content. And for me, this is where some of the power of the novel began to unravel. Don't get me wrong, it is a section absolutely filled with wonderful dark imagery, of a foreboding sense of tragedy and darkness, of cosmic horror, of the weird and the strange, as we're given the somewhat doom-laden account of Dutchman's Creek and the tragedies that befell it. However, I found that as this second section went on, it felt almost like a stream-of-consciousness piece, and whilst there's not necessarily anything wrong with that, it kind of jarred with what had come before it. The scenes and imagery piled on almost by rote, a sort of verging on monotone cadence; and while I enjoyed much of what transpired in this part, I also found it a struggle as it went on. Perhaps that was part of the point, to make the reader weary, but for me, it had the effect of pulling me out of the story in mild frustration. It also seemed a little too much to accept that all of this was being told in a diner to our two main characters in the space of perhaps a couple of hours. Eventually, though, we're reunited with Abe and Dan, and find out - partly through the mid-section narrative - just why Dan wants to find this creek so much. And rest assured, there's little that's good concerning his desires; though it is, tragically, eminently understandable why he would want to seek the creek (pardon the rough rhyming). Ultimately, I found the voice - and tale - of Abe and Dan to be the centre-piece of the novel, and it was perhaps a little unsettling to abandon them partway through for a very long section detailing the history of the location they're trying to reach. Perhaps this could have been cut down somewhat, or delivered in some other way, or perhaps this is simply me imagining how *I* would write it, how *I* would have preferred it. As it is, it's a very subjective mark-down (I can't stress just how subjective it is with regards to this particular work, given the almost universal accolades it's received), but that coupled with the frequent typos, and need for a little more editing work just let the book down for me a little. The ending is wonderful, apocalyptic and epic, and very satisfying. There is much to enjoy here, from the warm if melancholic tones of Abe, to the almost Barker-esque levels of dark awe and majestic horror. For me, it only just falls short of being perfect, but I would certainly read more from Langan, and, indeed, I'd be open to rereading The Fisherman, especially as I now know what to expect in terms of tone and pace. Definitely a worthy addition to the halls of literary dark fiction, if not quite up there for me with the best in my estimation.