The Fisherman

John Langan's The Fisherman won the Bram Stoker Award last year for Best Novel, and while it has some dodgy parts, I found it to be an excellent suspense novel. Though it has elements of H.P. Lovecraft, it's not a Cthulu book, nor is it about Satanism (I think). It has its own brand of terror.

The novel is narrated by Abe, an IBM employee who lives in the Hudson Valley of New York near the Catskills. After losing his wife to cancer, he awakens one day with the urge to fish, which he hadn't done since he was a kid. He does it every weekend, finding different places within a few hours of where he lives.

A co-worker, Dan, has had a personal tragedy as well, his wife and twin sons killed in a car accident. A lost man, he ends up as Abe's fishing buddy. One day Dan suggests they go to a place called Dutchman's Creek, which dumps out of the Ashokan Reservoir, which when it was formed removed the buildings of a few towns (I'm well aware of this place, because I every time I drove to Cooperstown I went by it).

Before they fish the creek, they stop at a diner and strike up a conversation with the owner, Howard, who proceeds to tell them why Dutchman's Creek is a dangerous place. This story takes up about a third of the book. It concerns a German immigrant, before the Civil War, a philologist who also dabbles in the occult. He and his family live in a camp where he works as a stone mason. Things start getting weird, especially when a woman comes back from the grave: "What catches his attention is the fact that the woman is soaked, from head to foot, as if she’d been doused with a barrel of water the second before Rainer stepped through the front door. Her hair, her dress, are sopping. Her skin shines. It almost looks as if the water is flowing out of Helen, but that’s probably a trick of the light. The rumors are correct in one detail, the woman’s eyes, which are dull gold, the pupils black holes."

The German becomes convinced there is an evil presence in an old mansion, and he and a few friends go there to confront the evil. This is all very well done, although the pay-off isn't as good as the build-up (it usually never is). I had trouble visualizing what was going on, and the story didn't sound like someone talking (it was in the first person, Howard's voice).

The story then ends with Dan and Abe finding out what's wrong with Dutchman's Creek.

Langan never pinpoints the source of the horror. There are Biblical references, such as the Leviathan, and references to an Egyptian god, Apep. That might drive someone who can be anal, like me, to distraction. But I appreciated the way he dealt with grief as an embodiment of something sinister. Abe and Dan, at the creek, each are tempted, and one resists and one gives in.

There are some pretty heavy scenes, too. Besides the walking dead woman, there is a lot of savagery in the showdown at the mansion, including a man beheaded, and this little bit of levity: "His chubby face, more baby than little boy, was wavering, the mouth stretching wider, splitting his cheeks most of the way to his ears, the blanched gums sprouting rows of serrated fangs that would not have been out of place in the mouth of a shark."

Langan, who lives in the area, makes nice use of real places, and he also seems to know a lot about fishing, whereas I know nothing. He takes a moment to explain its allure: "God, but I love that first cast. You pinch the line to the rod, open the bail, lift the rod over your head, and snap your wrist, releasing the line as you do. The motion whips up the rod, taking the pink and green spinner-bait at the end of the line back and then out, out and out and out, trailing line like a jet speeding ahead of its contrail, climbing to the top of the parabola whose far end is going to put the lure right next to those fish. The reel feeds out more and more line, making a quick, whizzing sound as it spins; while the lure nears the apex of its flight and starts to slow, causing the line to bunch up right behind it. When the lure falls toward the water, it takes longer than it seems it should, so that for a moment, you wonder if it’s already hit the surface and somehow you missed it, and you’re almost to the point of searching for the spot where it went in when the spinner flashes and you look in time to see the water leap up with a plunk."

That almost wants to make me take up fishing, but just not at Dutchman's Creek.