The Fisherman in Creatures, Creatures Everywhere!

Apr 18, 2025 Nicolai Alexander rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: weird-fiction

Many novels deal with several themes at once. There’s more room to do so in that format than in short stories. Often, these themes are interconnected on a variety of levels. Like power and capitalism or love and purpose or identity and friendship. But some novels are singularly fixed on one theme, and wherever they branch out, it’s for the sole purpose of increasing our understanding of that core concept and reinforcing whatever the essential emotion is. “The Fisherman” is one of those novels an Many novels deal with several themes at once. There’s more room to do so in that format than in short stories. Often, these themes are interconnected on a variety of levels. Like power and capitalism or love and purpose or identity and friendship. But some novels are singularly fixed on one theme, and wherever they branch out, it’s for the sole purpose of increasing our understanding of that core concept and reinforcing whatever the essential emotion is. “The Fisherman” is one of those novels and an example of weird fiction at its most somber, exploring how multifaceted grief can be. How overwhelming. How devastating. How beautiful. How deadly.

The narrative is divided into three parts, and the narrator in the first and third part is a man named Abe. He lost his wife to cancer. There will also be a man named Dan there. He lost his wife and children in a car crash. Abe shares this with us in a way that reads like a memoir. You feel like you truly get to know Abe, and consequently, you start developing a connection with him, which in turn makes you truly feel for him and his fishing buddy Dan. Langan’s conversational prose invites you to this acquaintance, lures you into his and Abe’s personal space of darkness. I genuinely respected their space, and what Abe had to say. I cared and listened attentively. Reading that first part was like falling in love with someone who I knew was about to die.

I liked how Terrence Rafferty in The New York Times described the two fishermen as “restless men, immobilized but never truly at peace. Again and again, they cast their lines in the hope of catching something, anything, that will restore them to who they were. “

If that was all there was to it, though, I’d just be depressed and maybe a little bit disappointed. I didn’t come here to read literary fiction after all. “The Fisherman” did win a Bram Stoker Award for best novel in 2016, so it has proven its worth as being more than that. The foreshadowing helped keep my interest, though. I don’t mind making a deep psychological dive first, and I was in no rush to get to the weird stuff, but I was still curious and eager to know what happened next. It was like fishing in that sense; you want something to bite, but it’s also nice to just sit there in the sun and breeze.

And when something did bite, it was in the form of a story within a story. The second part goes way back in time and features a whole new cast of characters, and that’s where all the weird stuff is happening. You do need some patience here. The prose is slow and detailed, in a good way, but sometimes in a more negative way: meandering and exhaustive. I’m not the only one to say that this part might be a bit too long. And when you’re near the end of it, you’ve lost all the emotional momentum from that first part. You almost forget about Abe and Dan and even care less about what becomes of them.

Arguably, there’s some pretty dismal and unsettling things that happen in this second part. People see crazy shit, people die, some comes back as a zombie or a grotesque fish, there’s black magic involved, a Lovecraftian sea monster and a mysterious villain, who you could say is the very personification of grief. I enjoyed most of that story-within-a-story as more and more weird stuff happened, but I think it would’ve been better served as its own story, as it just felt too unrelated to Dan and Abe. I also think there were too many other characters introduced along the way. Even though I was thoroughly engaged at least two thirds of the way, I lost track of who people were several times and often didn't get any time to care about them before we moved on to the next one.

Who can say? In the books, such men’s motives are often unclear, mysterious. They appear in strange places, in little, out-of-the-way villages, or in the middle of forests, or on the tops of mountains. Remember the fairy tales, all the witches and wizards with their houses in the woods. Maybe they want privacy for their work. Maybe there is something about the places they choose to live. Maybe the world is thinner there. Maybe they can hear the sounds they are listening for more clearly. (161)

Granted, the entire narrative is driven by grief as a force of its own, permeating the unknown and mysterious depths of that emotion as it becomes increasingly warped with weirdness and illumined by horror. Weird fiction is at its best when it can use this horror to examine and accentuate powerful emotions that feel just as impossible and overwhelming as the supernatural elements they embody or realize. It excels in transcending aspects of ourselves to a numinous state. Which is why it’s my favorite genre.

The ocean is everywhere. Not only does it stretch to the horizon in all directions, it’s under everything as well. I don’t mean underground, I mean – it’s fundamental, you might say. If what’s around us is a picture, then this is what it’s drawn on. Reverend Mapple had a word for it, the subjectile. Lottie said it was like, if you could cut a hole in the air, black water would come pouring out of it. (141)

But I (almost) digress. The third part was a disappointment. As I mentioned, my emotional connection to Abe and Dan was almost completely lost, and I kept reading with mild disinterest. It got boring towards the end. I still think the first and middle parts are good, I just don't think they complemented each other very well. There was so much promising momentum that just trailed off. Still, it’s a worthwhile read if any of the things I mentioned here strikes your fancy. It’s not your typical horror novel as you might’ve surmised already, so keep that in mind if that’s your main interest.
...more

28 likes · Like · see review