The Fisherman

I read damn near everything that looks at all worthwhile in sci-fi and literary horror. Much of what is published today is absolute crap. This is not crap.

I picked this up because I happened to read one of the authors short stories (in another genre). The writing in the short story was descriptive and articulate, the plot original and thoughtful, and the pacing was deliberate and appropriate. I wanted to see what else this Langan guy had written, so I ordered this. The day it arrived is the day I started it. And finished it that evening.

It was excellent; the attributes of his short story were exemplified in the (too brief) novel. The Fisherman is well-worth the purchase.

Here's a rich complex yarn that comfortably straddles the weird fiction of the Lovecraftesque landscape and the magical realism the fishing tale that crosses borders into the horrific before you even realize that it's too late to feel comfortable about anything. As a longtime resident of the Catskills, NY area I recognized the unmistakable Hudson Valley weird that inspired the likes of Washington Irving. On top of all this deliciosnes, Langan is a consummate professional and master of his craft. Here is a tightly edited and constructed novel that is seldom seen in the majority of genre fiction today.

Here is a tale of urgency, of grasping at straws, of defying the hand life has dealt, of a fear for one's life, and of a madness that consumes unfairly. I'm reminded of my dad, of myself, of what I imagine myself to be in some (hopefully) far flung future. The Fisherman is a fish story within a story within a story within a story; scales that slide back and forth against each other but are locked together by their common hooks. It's a story of pushing too far for something out of reach, and the difference between piercing that limit and knowing when to retreat, if screaming, back to the more mundane nightmares of the real world. I'm reminded of Robert W. Chambers and H.P. Lovecraft, who wrote of people who wanted more than they deserved and were willing to give more than they had. John Langan relates the book was hard to get published due to it being too genre or too literary. It's both, and it's great because of it.

Couldn't put this book down. The horror is subtle and gripping. So many examples to choose from, but the descriptions of Helen walking around the camp will haunt me for a long time. The dealing with loss at the center of the story struck me as some of the truest stuff I've ever read. Will read again.

If you are a connoisseur of rich, literate horror: Read. This. Book. For me, it was the most satisfying experience in this genre in several decades. I will not mention the plot, but I will describe the plotting. Too often reviewers spoil a book by exposing plot lines that would be better discovered and uncovered by assimilation through reading. The plot itself begins quietly and gradually attains speed like a locomotive leaving a station. The eeriness and unsettling flavor are well established long before midway through the volume. The author maintains this effect until the end, a profoundly difficult achievement that few horror books can claim. Once you reach the midpoint of this narrative, provide yourself with adequate time for the rest in one sitting. You will simply not want to stop.

Five stars? Are you kidding me? The writing is c+ at best. No bold and exciting language here. No risk-taking. No reward. All of the characters have the same speech pattern, use the same words in the same ways, have a deep love for cliche', and ramble on and on about details that add nothing but paragraphs and pages for us to slog through. Believe me, this book sounds like it should be great, but it isn't. I should have known when none of the reviews on the back cover or on the first few pages were from legit sources, all from fellow writers penning book blurbs for one another to help beef up sales.

I continue to find the store reviews more and more suspect. This book is in NO way a 5 ? book. While the core story has some intrigue and we'll written, it is sandwiched between a tedious opening and a weak unsatisfying ending. Brahm Stoker prize? Hmmm.

Somewhere between the covers of this novel is a decent short story about grief and loss. What starts assuredly enough, soon begins to plod in a predictable direction, which, ironically, even though the reader knows where its headed, Langan doesn’t seem to. That may be down to the fact it took him more than ten years to write, and whether that’s true or not, Langan’s slippery grasp of storytelling certainly made The Fisherman feel like it took ten years to read.

The first thing to set alarm bells ringing that you’re in for a long haul, is the structure. Abe, the main character, starts off by telling us about the story he’s about to tell us. Basically, backstory. This isn’t unusual in a framed narrative such as this, but when the backstory has backstory, you can be forgiven for wondering when the real story is going to begin. Once Abe has caught us all up to the here and now, we then get dunked deeper into backstory, relayed to us via a third-hand account of suspiciously detailed hearsay, and knowing we are going to be reading this twice doesn’t help the pace none. What follows is a hundred-and-fifty-page info dump of lifeless foreshadowing, and it’s excruciating.

Langan isn’t a bad writer – he has a tendency to rely on trite phrases (in fact these clichés litter the page), yet his prose is often sharp and well observed. But this flabby middle section showcases his weaknesses as a complete writer, namely characterisation and dialogue. The many characters that fill this section are never more than names on a page, and what little dialogue there is in the novel, is stilted and perfunctory and seriously lacking in personal color. Even Abe, if you take away his grief, has little to offer by way of depth.

Despite all this I kept on reading. Hearing the great reviews I felt sure there was going to be a poignant and emotional ending that would somehow make the effort worthwhile, but it never came. The theme of grief never comes full circle in any meaningful way, and the dénouement, which we have been trudging towards, feels ironically rushed. Langan then fumbles the ball completely, and gives Abe’s fishing buddy Dan the final word, in a cheesy attempt at menace that put me in mind of the child vampire Danny Glick tap-tapping at the window in Salem’s Lot. A real shame.

This meets our expectations of a classic fish story -- a long and meandering tall tale about a giant fish (sort of). Other reviewers think the book is in need of major editing, but I believe it's overly long on purpose, for effect. Like Moby Dick, it definitely doesn't follow Orwell's rules on succinct writing. For that, it's a bit of a slog even though, unlike Moby Dick, it's well under 300 pages. Thankfully there aren't whaling chapters; in fact, there's not a whole lot of fishing for a fishing book. It's not necessarily going to be a slam-dunk gift for the fisher-people in your life.

My plea to the store: please give us a sign when the book is going to be a "story in a story" with a period setting. I was fairly happily reading about an IBM employee when all of a sudden I'm stuck with an old reservoir-building camp before WW1. I notice when a lot of writers delve into the past, they work so hard on accuracy they forget to make it interesting, and this was no different. But how long could this boring, old-timey part possibly last? Five pages? Ten? The answer is 146 pages out of 263. I don't think that's what anybody signed on for. The book description is at best misleading.

When we finally come back to our IBM employee, he makes a comment that he is "story'd out." You and me both, Abe. Also, once again a man in a horror book has sex with the first morphing ghost/monster/zombie that comes along when he probably wouldn't have touched his wife during TTOM.

Overall, because of the long historical fiction part, I think you'll like this book best if you like older horror like Lovecraft and not newer stuff where, among other things, women get to get in on the action instead of just being wives & daughters.

There seems to be a renaissance in horror fiction these days. Not that there was ever a “dark ages” to the genre, but recently I’ve been coming across remarkably written novels that deliver intensely emotional and thought provoking stories along with the chills and scares. These are books that doesn’t fit a mold and doesn’t rehash tropes, but instead honors the classics, builds on them, and adds something new to the genre.

The Fisherman is a solid addition to this growing canon.

At its center is the concept of grief and how it changes us. The novel begins with the narrator, Abe, explaining how fishing saved him from a self-destructive spiral after his wife died. It’s a deeply touching account of how the hobby offered him some peace from the despair that overwhelmed him. Abe has a strong, distinctive, New England voice and a couple of chapters in I remarked, this is like a Stephen King character came to life and wrote this. Maybe Langan and King are drawing on the same regional influences, but I couldn’t help but get a nostalgic feeling while reading and wonder if it wasn’t an homage.

The story starts to move into horror territory when Abe meets Dan, another widower, who he takes under his wing and starts fishing with. Dan goes through a rough spell over the winter and when fishing season starts up again, he’s hell bent on trying out the mysterious Dutchman’s Creek. No one seems to know anything about it and those who do say: stay away.

And here is where the novel shows its true colors: this isn’t a story about fishing so much as it’s a story about the stories we tell. When the owner of a local diner is pushed about the Creek, he tells the story of a reverend who looked into its history. The diner owner tells the priest’s story, which is the story of the early days of the area and the damming up of the river. Along the way, characters in this recount will have their own stories to tell. I’m sure there are going to be some readers who are put off by this almost nesting-doll approach and see it as diversions from Abe’s plotline. But it really worked for me, and the deeper it went, the more absorbed I was in the book. Langan takes the idea of a fish tale and blows it up into a vast Lovecraftian adventure with a fisherman for a villain

We do get back to Abe and Dan, of course. And we see that there story is just the next chapter in this tragic epic driven by grief.

It’s really hard to express how much of a delight this book was. Despite its darkness, I felt almost giddy reading it because it was just so good. This was one of the few books where once I got to the end, I contemplated turning back to page one and starting over again. I cannot recommend The Fisherman highly enough.

John Langan is one of my favorite living writers, and, I'd like to think, a friend. His short fiction is some of the stuff that always reminds me that I need to work hard to make my own fiction better, and his enthusiasm for weird horror bleeds off the page. That said, his first novel, the mostly excellent haunted house tale House of Windows, read a bit like a novella exploded to novel length, at least the first time I read it lo these nearly seven years ago. (It's probably due a revisit.) Not so with The Fisherman, a book which, within its first few pages, immediately establishes itself as a great contemporary horror novel, and likely one of the great weird novels of all time.

While it's opening paragraphs may not carry quite as much punch as, say, classics like The Haunting of Hill House (which, really, has there ever been and opening paragraph that could compete with that one), it grabbed me instantly, and I think it'll go down in history as among the great openings, from its obvious nod to Melville to its description of the lure of the supernatural story. "Some of my stories are what I'd call strange. I know only a few of these, but they make you scratch your head and maybe give you a little shiver, which can be a pleasure in its own way."

The voice of both the narrator Abe and the subtly-shifted voice of the other story couched in the middle of the tale, make descriptions of simple acts like fishing as evocative as any unnatural goings-on, and the book's meditation on the nature and varieties of grief is at once poignant and nuanced, while never robbing the tale of its momentum of quiet dread. If the culmination of The Fisherman can never quite live up to the story-within-a-story that makes up the majority of the book's pages, that does little to dampen the power of a novel that has already taken a well-deserved place in the canon of the literary weird.

I have to admit that my initial reaction upon reading John Langan’s The Fisherman from Word Horde Press wasn’t quite the rapturous response that the novel appears to have engendered in other reviewers. As much as it is a solid and impressive slice of cosmic horror there’s something about the novel that threw me off. So, I read it again and have to say that part of me felt curiously disconnected from the story. I think that’s probably more of a subjective reaction on my part to the themes of loss and alienation in the novel than anything else though I would say that the story within the story structure didn’t quite gel for me.

Now, before you all start frothing at the mouth and muttering under your breath “wrong, wrong, wrong”, I will say that overall the novel is a damn fine piece of storytelling. The heart of the novel is the friendship between Abe and Dan, two men cut adrift in their lives due to bereavement and struggling to find something with which to tether themselves to reality. They discover that anchor in a passion for fishing but soon find out that their shared pain and longing is a tempting morsel of bait for far older and darker forces of nature that manifest themselves in the titular character.

For the most part, The Fisherman is the kind of novel that worms its way into your sub consciousness and lodges there. Langan does have this rather wicked style about his writing that makes you feel like you are huddled round a campfire listening to the protagonist Abe spin a tall tale, full of embellishment and exaggeration. This is brought to the fore when Dan suggests he and Abe check out an off map fishing spot called “Dutchman’s Creek.” Stopping off at a local diner for directions they encounter a cook who recounts how the area got its’ name. The recounting of this story forms the bulk of the novel and I can’t lie that I was hooked with a growing sense of unease and menace coupled with being gob smacked by the breathtaking imagery of the sea and The Fisherman’s titanic aquatic struggle.

This alone is worth the price of admission and I can’t deny that the way Langan writes the narrative destabilized my sense of reality and left me feeling disorientated and reeling. I just found it a bit too jarring to suddenly jump from Abe recounting an extremely detailed story told by someone else to him and Dan setting off to find the Creek. After reading the tale of Dutchman’s Creek, their story felt somewhat anti climatic as you know how it is going to end. Hmmm, maybe I’m just being too overtly analytical of what is actually a rather good story about sorcery, grief and the ends you would go to alleviate the pain.

This meets our expectations of a classic fish story -- a long and meandering tall tale about a giant fish (sort of). Other reviewers think the book is in need of major editing, but I believe it's overly long on purpose, for effect. Like Moby Dick, it definitely doesn't follow Orwell's rules on succinct writing. For that, it's a bit of a slog even though, unlike Moby Dick, it's well under 300 pages. Thankfully there aren't whaling chapters; in fact, there's not a whole lot of fishing for a fishing book. It's not necessarily going to be a slam-dunk gift for the fisher-people in your life.

My plea to the store: please give us a sign when the book is going to be a "story in a story" with a period setting. I was fairly happily reading about an IBM employee when all of a sudden I'm stuck with an old reservoir-building camp before WW1. I notice when a lot of writers delve into the past, they work so hard on accuracy they forget to make it interesting, and this was no different. But how long could this boring, old-timey part possibly last? Five pages? Ten? The answer is 146 pages out of 263. I don't think that's what anybody signed on for. The book description is at best misleading.

When we finally come back to our IBM employee, he makes a comment that he is "story'd out." You and me both, Abe. Also, once again a man in a horror book has sex with the first morphing ghost/monster/zombie that comes along when he probably wouldn't have touched his wife during TTOM.

Overall, because of the long historical fiction part, I think you'll like this book best if you like older horror like Lovecraft and not newer stuff where, among other things, women get to get in on the action instead of just being wives & daughters.

There seems to be a renaissance in horror fiction these days. Not that there was ever a “dark ages” to the genre, but recently I’ve been coming across remarkably written novels that deliver intensely emotional and thought provoking stories along with the chills and scares. These are books that doesn’t fit a mold and doesn’t rehash tropes, but instead honors the classics, builds on them, and adds something new to the genre.

The Fisherman is a solid addition to this growing canon.

At its center is the concept of grief and how it changes us. The novel begins with the narrator, Abe, explaining how fishing saved him from a self-destructive spiral after his wife died. It’s a deeply touching account of how the hobby offered him some peace from the despair that overwhelmed him. Abe has a strong, distinctive, New England voice and a couple of chapters in I remarked, this is like a Stephen King character came to life and wrote this. Maybe Langan and King are drawing on the same regional influences, but I couldn’t help but get a nostalgic feeling while reading and wonder if it wasn’t an homage.

The story starts to move into horror territory when Abe meets Dan, another widower, who he takes under his wing and starts fishing with. Dan goes through a rough spell over the winter and when fishing season starts up again, he’s hell bent on trying out the mysterious Dutchman’s Creek. No one seems to know anything about it and those who do say: stay away.

And here is where the novel shows its true colors: this isn’t a story about fishing so much as it’s a story about the stories we tell. When the owner of a local diner is pushed about the Creek, he tells the story of a reverend who looked into its history. The diner owner tells the priest’s story, which is the story of the early days of the area and the damming up of the river. Along the way, characters in this recount will have their own stories to tell. I’m sure there are going to be some readers who are put off by this almost nesting-doll approach and see it as diversions from Abe’s plotline. But it really worked for me, and the deeper it went, the more absorbed I was in the book. Langan takes the idea of a fish tale and blows it up into a vast Lovecraftian adventure with a fisherman for a villain

We do get back to Abe and Dan, of course. And we see that there story is just the next chapter in this tragic epic driven by grief.

It’s really hard to express how much of a delight this book was. Despite its darkness, I felt almost giddy reading it because it was just so good. This was one of the few books where once I got to the end, I contemplated turning back to page one and starting over again. I cannot recommend The Fisherman highly enough.

John Langan is one of my favorite living writers, and, I'd like to think, a friend. His short fiction is some of the stuff that always reminds me that I need to work hard to make my own fiction better, and his enthusiasm for weird horror bleeds off the page. That said, his first novel, the mostly excellent haunted house tale House of Windows, read a bit like a novella exploded to novel length, at least the first time I read it lo these nearly seven years ago. (It's probably due a revisit.) Not so with The Fisherman, a book which, within its first few pages, immediately establishes itself as a great contemporary horror novel, and likely one of the great weird novels of all time.

While it's opening paragraphs may not carry quite as much punch as, say, classics like The Haunting of Hill House (which, really, has there ever been and opening paragraph that could compete with that one), it grabbed me instantly, and I think it'll go down in history as among the great openings, from its obvious nod to Melville to its description of the lure of the supernatural story. "Some of my stories are what I'd call strange. I know only a few of these, but they make you scratch your head and maybe give you a little shiver, which can be a pleasure in its own way."

The voice of both the narrator Abe and the subtly-shifted voice of the other story couched in the middle of the tale, make descriptions of simple acts like fishing as evocative as any unnatural goings-on, and the book's meditation on the nature and varieties of grief is at once poignant and nuanced, while never robbing the tale of its momentum of quiet dread. If the culmination of The Fisherman can never quite live up to the story-within-a-story that makes up the majority of the book's pages, that does little to dampen the power of a novel that has already taken a well-deserved place in the canon of the literary weird.

I have to admit that my initial reaction upon reading John Langan’s The Fisherman from Word Horde Press wasn’t quite the rapturous response that the novel appears to have engendered in other reviewers. As much as it is a solid and impressive slice of cosmic horror there’s something about the novel that threw me off. So, I read it again and have to say that part of me felt curiously disconnected from the story. I think that’s probably more of a subjective reaction on my part to the themes of loss and alienation in the novel than anything else though I would say that the story within the story structure didn’t quite gel for me.

Now, before you all start frothing at the mouth and muttering under your breath “wrong, wrong, wrong”, I will say that overall the novel is a damn fine piece of storytelling. The heart of the novel is the friendship between Abe and Dan, two men cut adrift in their lives due to bereavement and struggling to find something with which to tether themselves to reality. They discover that anchor in a passion for fishing but soon find out that their shared pain and longing is a tempting morsel of bait for far older and darker forces of nature that manifest themselves in the titular character.

For the most part, The Fisherman is the kind of novel that worms its way into your sub consciousness and lodges there. Langan does have this rather wicked style about his writing that makes you feel like you are huddled round a campfire listening to the protagonist Abe spin a tall tale, full of embellishment and exaggeration. This is brought to the fore when Dan suggests he and Abe check out an off map fishing spot called “Dutchman’s Creek.” Stopping off at a local diner for directions they encounter a cook who recounts how the area got its’ name. The recounting of this story forms the bulk of the novel and I can’t lie that I was hooked with a growing sense of unease and menace coupled with being gob smacked by the breathtaking imagery of the sea and The Fisherman’s titanic aquatic struggle.

This alone is worth the price of admission and I can’t deny that the way Langan writes the narrative destabilized my sense of reality and left me feeling disorientated and reeling. I just found it a bit too jarring to suddenly jump from Abe recounting an extremely detailed story told by someone else to him and Dan setting off to find the Creek. After reading the tale of Dutchman’s Creek, their story felt somewhat anti climatic as you know how it is going to end. Hmmm, maybe I’m just being too overtly analytical of what is actually a rather good story about sorcery, grief and the ends you would go to alleviate the pain.

I believe it was Cody Goodfellow who said that cosmic horror was pulp existentialism and John Langan's THE FISHERMAN is more or less that with a couple philosophical freebies packed up. But it's not dry, preachy or anything. Think of it like a cross between a lugubrious folktale and old school video game PHANTASMAGORIA 2 for there are two narratives embedded into one another here.

While I struggled with the vernacular at times (the ambitious nature of the narration torpedoes dramatic moments), I loved that the horror was rooted in presocratic philosophy. Rivers and water in general has a very strong symbolism and give another layer of meaning to Langan's narrative. THE FISHERMAN is about way more than just scaring the crap out of you (although it does). It's about loss, coping and the importance of keeping up with the flow of life. Really liked that book.

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.

Storytelling at its finest. There are stories within stories. At some point I believe there was a story inside a story inside a story maybe even inside another story. It truly is beautifully written. It reads like an old fisherman's tale with a lot of dark fantastical elements to it. I was engrossed in the book the entire time I read it. It took me a little longer than it normally does for me to read a novel this size, simply because I wanted to savor it and not miss a thing.

The back of the book does a great job of describing the plot in a nutshell but it lacks the nuance of pain and loss that are described so strongly in the book. It lacks the originality of the monsters within the pages of the book. There is tons of symbolism and metaphors weaved within the text. To truly appreciate how well this novel is written you really have to go all in.

John Langan is a mighty beast with the pen. I was head over heels about his last collection of stories The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies. I cannot wait for Langan's next official release. Until then I will be reading his short stories and maybe some of his older books. The guy is obviously gifted at what he does.

The Fisherman is a truly marvelous novel that hits me in so many sweet spots that they're hard to count. There's fishing--I spent many wonderful years fishing, now in the past, but the novel really captures the joy of this simple but infinitely variable pleasure. There are a few references to Moby Dick, one of my favorite novels, but these aren't overdone and don't constrain the novel. There're references to classic country music and the Catskills of New York. There's a wonderful extended historical section, folk horror for its afficianados. And it's all fits into a classic structure, and by using the term 'classic' I am suggesting both its relationship to the past and by how well the novel stands up for the future. The writing itself is deceptively simple, a page-turner, but each word carefully chosen and not a one out of place. It's one of those novels that almost everyone will find something to identify with. Good stuff!

This one hooked me right away. (Yes. I went there…I couldn’t help myself.)

I was immediately immersed in the story(s) from the very beginning. I dug everything about it. It was dark and brooding. Cosmic and literary.

Abe and Dan have both suffered devastating loses. Fishing is a great form of therapy for them.

Next on the agenda, Dutchman’s Creek, a hidden river that promises some huge catches. When Abe and Dan stop for an early breakfast at a small diner to wait out a rain storm, they are related the story about the creek and the mythos that surrounds the area. The legend of Der Fisher: The Fisherman.

This one was really interesting. A novella of cosmic horror expertly told and woven, sandwiched in-between the much more compact tale of Abe and Dan. It shouldn’t have worked as well as it did. (I can see by some of the reviews that it didn’t for a few people.) I had zero problems with the longer Fisherman backstory in the middle and thought the history was truly fascinating and brought it all around in the end.

A great read. Original, terrifying and dripping with atmosphere.

Some streams run deep.
Deep and dark.
He waits.

Langan's THE FISHERMAN is an astounding piece of literature. At turns endearing and fantastical and horrific, I was enthralled with the deftness of skill Langan employed when slipping one captivating story into another and then, in the latter third of the book, allowing them both to emerge entwined and knotted together. I couldn't help but notice some of the subtleties of the writing craft which, as is evidenced by Langan's previous work (MR. GAUNT AND OTHER UNEASY ENCOUNTERS is a favorite), he knows well and handles with the skill of any of the literary "greats" of our time.
And that's the thing about THE FISHERMAN. It is a delightful melding of two different tales which, at first, do not appear compatible, yet produce quite a yarn when fused together.
In Langan's prose, I find all the best elements of, yes, Norman Maclean, but also Lovecraft, King, Faulkner, and Jim Harrison. And all of it infused with a poetic undercurrent that reminds me of the great E.E. Cummings.
In short, I believe that all kinds of readers, from the genre and for-fun readers to the most ardent literary-only readers, would find this a powerful, contemplative, and thrilling tale that is uniquely American in the best way. Highly recommended.

I finished John Langan’s novel The Fisherman last night at 1:30 in the morning because the thing gave me no choice. After hitting the halfway mark I had to see it all the way through, like I had dived down deep in black water chasing some bit of shiny tranklement and was now clawing desperately back up to break the surface for my breath. My expectations were pretty high to begin with and the novel delivered and then some. I cared about the characters, the monsters and supernatural elements felt truly otherworldly and even mythic and above all there was heart just as much as there was weird creeping darkness and heartbreak. If you want an imaginative horror story told in a strong folky voice with ample amounts of spooky ghoulish dread, here is your book, take the dive.

A unique and eerie tale, John Langan's The Fisherman wasn't quite what I expected when I first cracked it, which turned out mostly for the better. The story-within-a-story that forms the middle and meatiest chunk of the book far overshadows the book-ending pieces with the main character and narrator. Definitely a must read for anyone who wants something different from "the standard" horror fiction, The Fisherman is both a throwback to truly weird fiction and a type of story that is all John Langan's own. Recommended.

This novel is completely amazing. The level of imagination and layering is superb. The nightmare visions seemed to come one after another as the story progressed and the characters were complex. It you enjoy highly detailed novels with great characters. I could especially relate to Abe, the MC. His obsession with fishing was something I've felt many times with things. The authors descriptions of the dark ocean where Leviathan dwells is one of the most frightening depictions of a Hell that I've ever read. Great job Mr. Langan. Very very impressed.

'The Fisherman' is a novel about loss, and the vast, deep reservoir of cosmic dread to which it allows privileged access. The story shares some of the themes and structure of 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward' (which is acknowledged with a wink at the appropriate moment), and shows the same care for historical detail and sense of place that are that novel's strengths. Langan turns his Lovecraftian lens inward rather than outward, and provides a terrifying and heart-wrenching look at the human condition, and what befalls those who refuse its dictates. It's a strong novel, original, utterly engrossing. With it, Langan show once more that "Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear."

John Langan’s The Fisherman is a slow-burn tale of cosmic horror told on two fronts. This is the story of two widowers, Abe and Dan, who find solace in their shared hobby of fishing and plan on sinking their lines into Dutchman’s Creek, a hard to find locale unless you know exactly where to look. Beyond being hard to find, there’s rumors about this creek…rumors and stories. Dutchman’s Creek has a lot of history, and Langan focuses on this for the bulk of his narrative.

I have to admit, when Abe began relaying the story of Dutchman’s Creek, as told to him by a cook at a diner they stop at before embarking on their trip, who heard it from a priest who heard it from somebody else, I was worried that this book would be reduced to a game of Telephone. I was also a bit jarred by, after having spent several long chapters with Abe and getting lost in his narrative and intonations of their ill-fated trip to Dutchman’s Creek, I was suddenly in the midst of a historical story 100 years prior.

Thankfully, the history Langan presents is rich and highly interesting, and filled with several intriguing characters. Once the horror elements begin to weave their way into the account, the story really kicks into high gear with some wonderful imagery and fantastical scenarios. I flat-out loved the mythology Langan explores here, exploiting the watery elements in both theme and object to deliver an excellent bit of cosmic horror. Langan invests us in these characters (both past and present) suitably well, and the sense of creeping dread is completely engrossing.

The biggest risk in presenting a narrative with the story-within-a-story approach is that there are effectively two endings. I found the climax to the historical segment to be much more satisfying than the present-day events, although once Abe and Dan’s stories reach their finish the moody atmosphere was scintillating enough that even though I’d finished reading this on a sunny evening I’d swear the sky was filled with dark, rain-laden clouds.

The Fisherman was the first book I’ve read by Langan, and you can mark me as suitably impressed. His writing style is very comfortable, and within a matter of pages I felt like I was right there with Abe, listening to a long fisherman’s story on the river’s shores. And while this is a densely written story, it is a compulsively readable one. Through Abe, Langan sinks his hooks in deep enough to catch you by surprise, and then you just wait for him to reel you in. Once he does, it is so very worth it.

[Note: I received a copy of this title from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.]

I was really looking forward to John Langan's novel, THE FISHERMAN. Unfortunately, it was so slow during the middle passages, wherein the protagonist listens to the background story that will ultimately affect his and his friend's life, that I skimmed about 50% of the tale. It just begged to be trimmed down to, say novella-length, that I couldn't handle the plodding narrative. Sorry, but I can't recommend this novel at all!

This novel is a potent mix of cosmic menace, human frailties and dark folklore.  Two stories take place along different timelines and intersect in a colossal ordeal.  The writing is masterful, and the reader is literally plunged into a black sea of dire possibilities.  While the situations encountered are those of nightmares, the characters are fully drawn and wholly relatable.  This is a captivating read from beginning to end. 

An excellent study of horror and grief. The Fisherman manages to be both quietly terrifying and heart-wrenching at the same time. It also pulls off a bold narrative trick of giving over nearly half the book to a story set in a completely different era, with different characters- a move that threatens to initially derail the story, but proves to be so fascinating and gripping that it just makes the book even more compelling.

It's one of those books that is on your mind when you're not reading, wondering when you can get back to reading more. Great work.

A beautifully crafted Lovecraftian tale. As I read this I could almost imagine the author, John Langan, handwriting this amazing tale, carefully choosing each word. Written as two pieces--a mythology from over a 100 years that dovetails into the current story of loss, this is easily the best horror novel I've read in years.

A​ ​horror​ ​epic​ ​unforgettable​ ​in​ ​its​ ​richness,​ ​relatability,​ ​and​ ​overall​ ​impression.​ ​Melancholic longing​ ​draws​ ​two​ ​friends​ ​into​ ​mystical​ ​folklore​ ​and​ ​a​ ​place​ ​of​ ​unforseen​ ​power.​ ​The​ ​Fisherman is​ ​an​ ​engrossing​ ​and​ ​well​ ​written​ ​tale​ ​within​ ​a​ ​tale,​ ​all​ ​brought​ ​together​ ​effortlessly.

John Langan is a very capable writer. He has this rare skill of pinning you down to the book from the first page to the last. The imagery he creates is lush and unbelievably detailed. Unfortunately, this where the good things come to an end.
While the book has a very gripping and promising (while not at all original) start, the moment the author starts to tell you the fisherman's story (about a third into the book) the book comes crashing under its own weight. It becomes bloated and you can't help but feel that it all was written only for the sake of being written. Making a story within the story which is so detailed is completely unnecessary let alone the fact it doesn’t do anything good to the plot, as you can almost instantly guess how the book will end. It is almost like the author wasn’t able to decide what approach would work out best and decided to go for 2’in’1. At times it becomes straightforward stupid and you feel embarrassed as it seems like you're reading some darker jk rowlins book, so close it borders the fantasy genre.
Worst of all there is simply no ending or you could say there is the same ending repeated over and over every tenth of the book or so before it arrives to some sort of closure. The author leaves you with nothing to chew on, most likely he had nothing to say in the first place.
It is, however, a light and occasionally scary read which is as I pointed out above pretty good stylistically so if this is what you are looking for then go ahead I say. Otherwise a disappointment

A heartbreaking, deeply imaginative yarn about the dangers of delving too far into one's own past.

Langan's THE FISHERMAN unfolds into a complex tapestry of fascinating characters, stories within stories and--ultimately--another world entirely. Masterful.

Having previously encountered John Langan through his story collection The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies and being impressed enough to seek out other short stories and his novel Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, I was excited to hear that he had finished another novel. However, after seeing a relatively unexciting cover and reading a description that sounded like the novel would focus more on fishing (a topic that I have little to no interest in) and less on horror, I found my enthusiasm waning. I was worried that the book would not hold my interest and that there would be long passages relating to fishing that I would have to slog through to get to the parts that I would find interesting.

Well, after finishing the book I can say that I had no reason to be concerned. Though the narrator's love of fishing and its ability to help him move past the death of his wife is central to the story, Langan never gets bogged down in the overly detailed (and tedious) passages that I've seen other authors fall into when writing about a topic about which they are very passionate. Beyond this, it is worth considering that a good portion of the center of the novel is given over to the narrator's story of the historical background of the area in which the most important events of the story take place and that this section contains no real references to fishing, just pure supernatural horror. I really enjoyed this section and felt that it did a great job of building tension and setting in place the elements that become important in the later parts of the novel that occur in the modern time of the narrator.

Overall, the writing is very impressive and the story never drags. If you enjoy Stephen King's writing, you would likely enjoy this novel as well, as there are structural (if not stylistic) similarities to some of King's novels. The central horror certainly has Lovecraftian elements and the blurb on the cover by Laird Barron compares it to M.R. James, which I could certainly see, especially in the historical section. It moved very quickly and for me fell easily into the oft-used category of books "you can't put down".

I couldn’t find a thing wrong with The Fisherman. It’s the kind of book you want to get right back into the moment you finish the last line (which, as much as I love something, is not a sentiment I often have). There’s so much detail here, so much careful world- and character-building in Langan’s work that you could find something new in it every time you revisited it.

Read my full review here: [...]