🎃 What I Am Reading for Halloween: "The Fisherman" by John Langan

This novel, with a major "fishing" theme and a secondary theme of “widowing,” was what I think of as a "traditional" horror novel, where a relatable main character is drawn into events he doesn't understand by a friend with an agenda.

Abe works for IBM in upstate New York in probably the '80s or so, and loses his wife to cancer only a year into their marriage. Eventually, he finds that the best way to cope with his grief is in the act of fishing, an activity that the author clearly enjoys himself from the way it is lovingly recounted and rendered. Over a decade after his loss, he is composed and at peace, when one of his younger coworkers, Dan, loses his wife and children in a car accident. Eventually, Abe is able to bring Dan to the water's edge with him, and fishing seems to be a way for him to cope as well.

However, the fishing season has a definite end point, and during the winter, Dan relapses into grief in the absence of his extended family support network. Abe thinks that their fishing days are over, until Dan abruptly asks him to join him in the search for Dutchman's Creek, which flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir.

By a narrow margin, the majority of the novel is actually a flashback to the early years of the 20th century, where a labor crew working on the Ashokan has a death, the wife of a worker crushed by a runaway carriage. This would have been a normal tragedy if the wife had not returned a few days later, alive but eternally damp and with golden, fish-like eyes, and in possession of knowledge she should not have. Fortunately, the protagonist of this flashback is Rainer Schmidt, a disgraced former German academic and magic-dabbler. Rainer ascertains that the bereaved husband went to the Guest, a mysterious figure who had lived reclusively for much of the previous century with the local feudal landowner after that landowner had himself lost his wife. Rainer learns that the Guest is actually Der Fischer, a man whose magical efforts are focused to traveling to a kind of foundational level of reality: a black ocean where an incomprehensibly large sea monster, depicted in the Bible as the Leviathan, lives. The Guest/Der Fischer is in fact a Hungarian scholar/magician from the sixteenth century who (to get too far in to the backstory’s backstory) stole a book called The Secret Words of Osiris from another arcane scholar of the time, Heinrich Khunrath. Der Fischer is called this, The Fisherman, because his quest is to catch this Leviathan, using ropes woven "from the hairs of ten thousand dead men" and hooks forged from “the swords of a hundred dead kings" and use its powers to bring back, you guessed it, his own murdered wife and child.

Rainer and a few other workers travel to the old house that Der Fischer lives in, and travel through it to the land surrounding the dark sea (through magic mostly unexplained, as is the better arrangement for horror books, versus explicitly laying out a strict magic system). The Leviathan has already been hooked by many massive lines, but after a struggle, Rainer and his team manage to sever some of the lines, one recoil hooking Der Fischer and dragging him into the surf. This is enough to quiet the issue for their lifetime, and keep their region safe.

This tale is related to Abe and Dan by the proprietor of a diner, who heard it from a priest who received it from Rainer's daughter. The legend comes around to Dutchman's Creek, flowing out of the reservoir, and seemingly the source of any remaining corruption. Dan however already knew something of the Creek's power, as his grandfather glimpsed his own departed wife there while fishing many years ago. By now, you can tell what his intentions are.

That predictability however does not detract from the novel, and the many identifiable tropes, plot points, and motivations are used effectively. There is definitely a strong amount of Lovecraft in the mix, from the upstate New York setting, which I consider to not be far off from New England, to the scholarly protagonist (Rainer was a philologist), to the reservoir of "The Colour Out Of Space," to the [reanimated] fish people of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." I liked the idea of the black ocean, which is also glimpsed through a vision of Rainer's daughter, Lottie, who has it projected into her mind as being full of floating dead people, all but their heads submerged, mindlessly babbling their darkest and most perverse thoughts; and through one of Rainer's misadventures in his youth, when he traveled to a city at the ocean's edge with contradictory and confusing urban geography, patrolled by police in bird masks with curved knives, in order to pick a soul-flower from a grave in the necropolis. This gives a nice dark fairy-tale flavor to two stories grounded in real-world geography.

Additionally, the theme of loss made the characters' motivations very understandable, specifically the loss of wives (obviously an entirely male perspective, but the women who are not motivating casualties have a strong, if supporting, showing). I can understand that motivating anyone to extreme action, even the obsessive Renaissance-era wizard; but I also appreciate the need to move on, and find peace.

It was not until I had finished reading that I found "Der Fischer," a poem by Goethe, which is not noted in the afterword but seems to me to be a bit of an inspiration, if the author read it.

Did It Scare Me?

I was pretty absorbed in the story, and was therefore plenty unsettled through the backstory section. This was especially true when the reincarnated fish-woman is puttering through the work camp, causing havoc and trying to chase down her enemies (and when she causes her husband to vomit up a bunch of one-eyed tadpoles). This element caused a solid feeling of dread on behalf of the characters, as the reincarnated people, more of whom are encountered later, are threatening without necessarily being dangerous 100% of the time. You never know what they will do next.