Book Review: The Fisherman by John Langan - More2Read
 

The Fisherman by John Langan

In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman’s Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other’s company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story. Soon, though, the men find themselves drawn into a tale as deep and old as the Reservoir. It’s a tale of dark pacts, of long-buried secrets, and of a mysterious figure known as Der Fisher: the Fisherman. It will bring Abe and Dan face to face with all that they have lost, and with the price they must pay to regain it.


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Review:

In the pursuit of fishing, on the road at a place of meetings, conversing, a story being related, deeper and deeper, consuming and succumbing the reader with a tale of tragedies and terribleness by the sea, a mysterious history, the coast, deaths, women and men. 

Tales told at a camp fire, at lamplight, long unwinding mysterious gothic and weird tales of an era and time past, ones with troubles that weigh the soul, death and loss with a melancholy and malevolent existences.

Men in pursuit of many aspects, things veiled, the fish, the dead loved ones, mysteries will be unveiled.

Evoking the scene, prose in lucid form, moving back and forth, old and new, flowing like the sea, a gathering of things, tales, myths, things that swim and things that haunt and instil fear and anxieties, turmoilous and treacherous times ahead in the tale with the mysterious, the melancholy, the peoples, with friendship love and loss weighing upon the characters, along with mystery and the mythological tales, the cosmic horror unraveling old and new.

 

Reviewed by Lou Pendergrast on 10 April 2019