The Fisherman is a horror novel that won the Bram Stoker Award that was published in 2016 and was written by John Langan. A moving, powerful work of epic horror that is relevant, seeing how it focuses on grief and the resulting suffering, The Fisherman is simply a great book to read.
The protagonist of the book is called Abraham, though he calls himself Abe. He says that years ago he went to a place known as Dutchman’s Creek, or “Der Platz das Fischer,” an area that is in the Catskill Mountains. He states that Dutchman’s Creek is extremely deep, and that it includes creatures unimaginable to humanity. As a child, he went fishing, though he wasn’t interested in it that much then. When he worked his job, he met a woman named Marie, who was significantly younger than him. He fell in love with her and they were married, but it turned out that she had advanced cancer: less than two years after their marriage, she was dead. Before she perished, she was quite calm, and accepted her fate. When she died, Abe was devastated, though he still maintained his composure. To briefly escape his grief, he picked up the hobby of fishing and frequently went to places to fish, and was particularly interested in the Catskills due to their natural beauty. One of Abe’s coworkers was a man named Dan (short for Daniel) Anthony Drescher. He graduated near the top at his class from M.I.T. and was married with twin sons. Unfortunately, he got into a deadly car accident that took their lives: a huge truck crushed his car at an intersection. While he was thrown out of the car through the windshield, his wife and twin sons died instantly in the collision. He soon returned to work: the only indication that he had gone through what he did was a long scar on his face. Abe recollected that although they both encountered loss, the nature of their losses were vastly different: Abe had time to spend with his wife and to manage his affairs while Dan lost his family in the blink of an eye. Consequently, although Abe wanted to talk to Dan, he was afraid he would incite his hatred, seeing how he was luckier than him in a certain way. A few months after the accident, Abe invited Dan to go fishing with him. Dan accepted, and they spent a significant amount of time with each other, though Dan always kept to himself, seeing how he scarcely talked. However, there was one time Dan opened up significantly to Abe: he told him that he dealt with his grief by going to the place where the car accident happened and observing the traffic light that was installed there after the fatal accident. Dan reveals that at the funeral of his family, the priest said that they were in Heaven and enjoying eternal bliss (this claim is spurious: there’s no empirical evidence to support this hypothesis) and that he himself urgently wants to know what’s in the afterlife, if there is one. Dan then says that if there’s a god, he might be malevolent and callous, seeing what he allows to happen to people. He ends his conversation by saying that it’s possible that humans can’t accept the hard truth: it’s possible that when people learn of the reality of the world (including the afterlife, if there is one), they’ll be utterly crushed by the truth. Abe recollects that people’s minds are indeed fragile: truth is frequently denied due to what it will mean to people’s egos. “But there are some things, no matter if they’re true, you can’t live with them. You have to refuse them. You turn your eyes away from whatever’s squatting right there in front of you and not only pretend it isn’t there now, but that you never saw it in the first place. You do so because your soul is a frail thing that can’t stand the blast-furnace heat of revelation, and truth be damned. What else can a body do?” (29). That night, Dan stayed at Abe’s house, and Abe had a disturbing dream. In his dream, he was fishing in a strange ominous lake that was near a terrifying forest. Although terrified, he didn't attempt to flee when something took his line. When he drew his line in, it turned out what he had caught was his wife’s decapitated head: the hook went through her mouth, but instead of blood, a viscous black fluid was emitting from it. Her eyes then opened: they were yellow. In his own words, “Marie’s eyes, her warm, brown eyes, which had held so much of passion and kindness, were gone, replaced by flat, yellow-gold disks, by the dull dead eyes of a fish.” (32). Marie’s head then tells Abe that what’s lost is lost, and that some streams go far deeper than others. She mentions “Der Fischer,” and her face splits open, dragging Abe into the lake. “From the spot where my lure pierced her lip, a deep gash raced up her face into her hair, splitting her skin. As I watched horrified, the edges of it peeled away from each other, revealing something shining and scaled underneath. I cried out, stumbling backwards, and without a backward glance Marie dove beneath the rushing white stream. The fishing line, locked in place, tightened, pulling me headline toward the water, my hands unable to release their grip on the rod … I flew headlong into the white water and open mouths full of white teeth, rows and rows of white teeth in white water, and beyond them” (33).
Dan later told Abe that they should go to Dutchman’s Creek, as he read in a book that it was a good place to fish. When they drove towards it, it was raining, causing them to eat breakfast at Herman’s Diner. They told one of the people there, Howard, that they were going to Dutchman’s Creek. Upon hearing of it, Howard was horrified, telling them that it was quite dangerous, seeing the unpredictability of the behavior of the water. Howard then ominously tells them that the creek is hungry for victims, and tells them the story of Dutchman’s Creek, which makes up more than half of the book. The tale begins with a priest, Reverend Mapple, administering his presence to an old woman named Lottie (her family put her in a nursing home, and her senility was causing her mental state to rapidly degenerate). For some time he was interested in Dutchman’s Creek (also spelled “Deutschman’s Creek) and mentioned its name in her presence. To his surprise, she became frantic and terrified, speaking in German and English, imploring him to not go. When he asked her why, she refused to answer, seeing that she was sworn to secrecy by her father. Reverend Mapple then said that if that was the case, he will go there to find out for himself: horrified, she told him everything to prevent him from doing so. The land where Dutchman’s Creek was founded was originally founded in a sedentary manner by the Dutch. One day, a strange man who appeared to be extremely old appeared and entered the house of Cornelius Dort, a rich miser. He was married to Beatrice, a girl twenty years younger than him (it was likely that she married him to prevent him from closing her father’s hotel) whom he quickly made pregnant. Unfortunately, when she was riding a horse, she was thrown off, causing her to lose the baby and to fall into a lingering sickness (Cornelius later hacked the horse to death with an axe in cold blood). Cornelius, as expected, hired many doctors, but none of them were able to treat Beatrice. The stranger, upon arriving at Cornelius’s house, was given the second floor: two days after his arrival, Beatrice died. However, Cornelius didn't kick him out, and he didn't seem to be upset at all at her funeral: in fact, he looked bored. The stranger (known as the Guest) is allowed by Cornelius to continue to stay in the house. While he almost constantly stays within the building, he occasionally leaves: “once in a while you’ll see the Guest walking by it, a length of string looped from one hand. Folks like to joke he’s fishing, earning his keep. Occasionally you’ll see him walking with Cornelius, strolling through one of the Dort apple orchards. The Guest appears to be walking, gesturing with his hands every now and again, making big, sweeping gestures as if he’s conducting a symphony. Cornelius walks with his hands clasped behind his back, his head bowed, brow furrowed, obviously hanging on the Guest’s every word … Some adventurous child overheard the Guest mention the Leviathan during one of his and Cornelius’s orchard walks … The news comes from one of the tanneries about some hides Cornelius sent up to have tanned … the hides Cornelius wants treated are like nothing the fellows at this particular tannery have encountered. I’m not sure what made them so strange, but the tanners state flat out that they’re more like the skins of devils from hell than any beast they’ve ever seen. Along with these hides, Cornelius sends very specific instructions for how they’re to be handled, and pays three times the going rate to insure his instructions are followed by the letter.” (58-9).
People began to notice strange phenomena around Cornelius and the Guest: strange lights emitted from the house during the night, there were more thunderstorms (that were directly over the house), and Cornelius was reported to have walked with “a figure in black-not his Guest, no, this figure is distinctly feminine, wearing a long dress and a long, black veil. No one can make out her features, but there’s something about the way she walks that seems off, as if she isn’t used to using her legs her way, or has forgotten how.” (60). A painted named Otto Schalken happened to see her once, and he was so disturbed he committed suicide. However, before he died, he painted in a frenzy six drawings: “Otto, whose previous claim to fame was illustrating an edition of Coleridge’s poems, achieves the only celebrity he’ll know for a half-dozen canvases rendering that woman in the long black veil. He doesn’t include Cornelius in the paintings, which show the woman wandering not in a Catskill apple orchard, but next to the sea … there’s something about the sea-it’s black and storming, and the way he painted the woman’s dress and veil, it’s like she’s wearing that angry sea … He was pursued, Otto wrote, ‘by a very Geraldine, to whom my soul is no more than water to drink.’ … After completing the final canvas in the series, Otto sat down in the bedroom, took his straight razor in hand, and slit his throat from ear to ear.” (61). When the Civil War erupted, the Guest largely retreated from the public view, and Cornelius became a war profiteer, making much money off the suffering of soldiers. He got a stroke at eighty and used a cane to facilitate his mobility. Sometime later, there were plans to build a reservoir in the area, seeing how New York City was overpopulated, causing a shortage of water. Cornelius launched a campaign against the construction of the reservoir (for reasons not entirely specified) but failed: for the first time in his life, he met a match that he couldn’t beat. To build the reservoir, eleven and a half towns were relocated, and a large number of laborers were needed. Lottie and her family came to the area to build the reservoir: her father, Rainer Schmidt, was a prestigious professor of philology before, but suddenly left his post due to mysterious reasons. Cornelius Dolt died in 1907 in strange circumstances: “He’s not yet surrendered the idea of halting the Reservoir’s construction, and to that end has summoned a team of lawyers to his house to discuss possible strategies for doing so. As he walks down the front walk to meet them, Cornelius stops where he was, shudders, and looks down at the ground beneath his feet. His face twists into a look-one of the lawyers who sees it describes it as ‘the look of a man striding across a frozen river who realizes with sudden horror that the ice he has been traversing has become too thin to support his weight.’ Cornelius shudders again, drops to the ground, and in the time it takes the lawyers to rush up to him, is gone. Story is that final expression, eyes starting from their sockets, lips curled back, remains on his face all the way to the grave.” (67). With his death, the Reservoir is basically guaranteed to be constructed. Cornelius left his estate to the Guest, and when the Guest validates his claim in public, people realize that he hasn’t aged at all. Over the years, he still remained a recluse and brought a huge amount of materials into his house, including ropes and chains. The Guest was seen walking with the woman in the black dress. Also, during the night, many voices, including that of Cornelius, came from the house, though no one entered or left the house. Going back to the Reservoir, quite a few people were injured to construct it, made all the worse by the fact that medicine wasn’t advanced in the day (amputation was the procedure of choice for many wounds). Helen, the woman living next to Lottie and her family, walked in front of a carriage powered by horses: though she survived the impact, she was badly mangled and died hours later. It turned out that it was possible that her husband cheated on her with a Swedish girl. After Helen’s death, her husband (George) is heartbroken, and is unable to function. His children lived with Lottie’s family, seeing how he appears to be unable to provide for them. One week after the death of his wife, he disappeared for a while before coming back in the early morning: he was smiling terribly, as “It was the smile of a man who knows that he’s committed a terrible act but is trying with all his might to convince himself that that isn’t the case.” (73). He claims that a miracle occurred, and asks for his children from Rainer.
Rainer, terrified of what George might do to him if he refuses, complies. He also rationalizes his behavior on the grounds that he lives next door: if anything bad happens, he can rescue them. A few minutes after leaving with his children, their screams of horror could be heard. When Rainer rushed to the house, he saw Helen’s reanimated corpse sitting on a chair: Helen’s eyes were yellow with black pupils. Aside from that, what was once Helen was horrifying to behold: “Helen had been pretty badly beaten-up by the mule-carts, most of the bones in her body broken, and she still looks, well, jagged, misshapen.” (75). George (who had basically gone insane) starts talking about “‘the man in the big house’” and said that he was the one responsible for bringing his wife back: the Guest is a sorcerer who requires the energy of people to secure his catch (the Leviathan), as he’s a fisherman. In exchange for one’s energy (and sanity), he will “fix” their grief by bringing back the person they lost (though in a much-changed form - Langan makes it clear that when people die in the world of The Fisherman, they change into something else entirely). In his own words, “‘The man understands what it is to lose … He listens. He understands. He doesn’t see why a man should suffer for what he didn't mean to do in the first place. Things happened, that was all. He doesn’t ask for what you don’t have. Strength-to add your strength to his. He gives you his cup. Not compassionate-no, he’s not compassionate; he’s interested, interested, yes. He will help you if you will help him … All he asks is that you drink from his cup. His task is almost done … He will help you if you will help him,’” “‘He’s a fisherman’” (76). Rainer proceeds by taking the children away from George’s custody and retreating back to his house. What was Helen then proceeds to arise and to move stiffly towards the house to get her children back: “she doesn’t walk right. She moves the way you’d expect a person trying to use a pair of shattered legs and a broken spine would. And if that isn’t strange enough, the footprints she leaves are wet” (78). She made her way towards Regina, the wife of Italo (a coworker of Rainer) who told the children to hide themselves in a room. Helen asked for her children: her voice sounded as if she was speaking in water, seeing its raspiness. Regina later noted that the words coming out of Helen’s mouth had an accent that “is what you’d imagine if an animal learned how to speak, something that wasn’t trying to master your particular language, but the idea of language itself” (79). Regina refuses to give the children to Helen, and Helen responds by trying to move past her: despite her bones being shattered, she possessed uncommon strength. However, she didn't succeed in entering the house, seeing that the children piled against the door. Helen begins bleeding from trying to enter, but instead of blood, a black fluid comes out. When Helen saw that she had been denied, she screamed in such a way that it traumatized those who heard it. She then whispers something to Regina, causing Regina a huge amount of pain. Helen retreated, and when Regina told Italo about what she told her, Italo said that it was impossible, as no one should know that. He tells Rainer that they have to kill her, seeing that she’s posing a danger to people. Later, George shrieked loudly: he was convulsing on the ground and speaking words in a variety of foreign tongues. To specify, Langan writes that George may have spoken English, Hungarian, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Greek, and other languages that all describe the same thing: black water. George then threw up a huge amount of seawater with creatures that appeared to be mutant tadpoles. That is, they were “black strips of flesh one or two inches long, every one capped by a single, bulbous blue eye, so it seemed as if the fellow who’d thrown them up had swallowed a bucketful of eyeballs. They flopped around on the floor, the things, as if they were trying to get a better look at the men standing horrified around them.” (86). George died from the convulsions: his death was covered up as a fit. Rainer then hypothesizes that the Guest is a practitioner of powerful and unpredictable magic that involves revealing the many layers of reality - he is ein Schwarzkunstler.
When the authorities were informed that George was dead, they sent the undertaker’s assistant, Miller Jeffries, to fetch the body. When he went to George’s house, he encountered Helen: she was sitting next to her husband’s corpse. No one knows what happened, but Jeffries left with a confidant and angry air, leaving George’s corpse on the ground. He then went to the undertaker and shot him four times with his shotgun. “When he’s finished, he takes the horse and cart and returns to the camp, to the hospital, where his sweetheart is a nurse. He finds her talking to a patient, a man recovering from the flu, raises the shotgun, and shoots her through the heart. She collapses onto her patient’s bed, and that fellow will tell the reporters he was sure he was next, but Jeffries only looked at him with dull eyes, said, ‘She told me everything,’ and turned the shotgun on himself.” (95). Of course, it appears that his fiancé had cheated on him with his boss: once he found out, he slew them both before ending himself. The second undertaker was successful in retrieving the body. Helen tried to find her children once again: this time, Italo and Regina were both present at their house, and waited at the front door for Helen’s presence. However, Helen outsmarted them: she walked around the house and tore some loose boards off to assault the children, as she grabbed one of Italo and Regina’s children, Giovanni, and knocked him unconscious. When Regina and Italo realized what had happened, they quickly entered the room. Regina batters Helen’s arm to oblivion before she is able to leave. Helen then goes to Lottie, and speaks the language of the other world: this language is differentiated from regular human language in that when one speaks, one conjures a mental representation of what one is saying. That is, “One second, she’s standing in a dark closet full of the reek of death. The next, she’s looking out at a vast, black ocean. Great, foaming waves rear and collapse as far as the eye can see, while overhead churning clouds flicker with lightning … here was true enormity. Now, faced with the black ocean, she confronts a vastness that makes the Atlantic seem little more than a pond. As she watches, huge backs slide up out of and back under the waves; Lottie’s reasonably sure they aren’t whales, since no whale she knows of sports a row of spikes down its spine. She has the sense of more, and bigger, beasts waiting beneath the water’s surface, forms as immense as a nightmare. 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 cut a hole in the air, black water would come pouring out of it.” (102-3). Lottie later sees a massive amount of people in the dark ocean: the only part of them that is visible is their heads, and their heads are just above the surface of the ocean. The people in the ocean have almost no intelligence or sign of life save dialogue. That is, each person in the ocean speaks their most depraved, selfish, hateful, and horrendous thoughts and feelings. Even more, the people in the dark ocean probably comprise every individual who has ever lived: Lottie spots her own head, and it turns out that she lusted after Italo and fiercely resented her two sisters for coming into the world, as she was expected to take care of them. Lottie, seeing all of this, is horrified, but the damage is done: “Those ants have already found their way into her head and are running madly round and round her brain. She pulls away from the scene, lowers the telescope, so to speak, until she’s back above the highest waves. The roar of the ocean, she understands, is the accumulated voices of this multitude, of who knows how many monologues of rage, pain, and frustration” (105). An almost unimaginably large creature emerged from the depths of the ocean: “Lottie can see its outline forming in the water, a rounded shape larger than any object she’s ever seen, larger than the ship that brought her to America, larger than Brooklyn Bridge, larger than the dam her father is helping to build … Lottie sees that it’s a mouth, a titanic maw ringed with jagged teeth the size of houses. It continues to rise toward her, waterfalls streaming down its sides, waves crashing against it, hundreds of people sliding down into its cavernous gullet. It’s like the mouth of an inconceivably huge snake, one of those monsters you read about in ancient myths, so big it wraps around the earth and holds its own tail in its mouth … Lottie feels herself overwhelmed. The sheer size of this thing-it’s as if the immensity alone threatens to extinguish her, blow her out the way a strong wind would a candle. Faced with that mouth, that throat leading down to endless depths, Lottie feels herself flicker.” (106). Despite being in a state of emotional shock, she was able to break free from the trance Helen put her in by throwing the bag of almonds towards her. The moment Helen’s words were interrupted, the world Lottie knew came back in. People hear the commotion, but before they entered the room she was in, Helen tells Lottie that the creature will always be waiting for her presence in the dark sea (basically, the Leviathan is a creature so unfathomable, immense, and powerful that when people die and are transformed, it uses them as servants to do its bidding and to devour them as a food source). When people found Lottie, she was sobbing: Helen was gone.
Rainer, finding his daughter in a state of unconsciousness and weakness (she couldn’t stomach knowing the truth of the afterlife and of reality as a whole), confirms that Helen has poisoned her soul. He begins to put a plan into action which will save Lottie and prevent Helen from causing any more trouble. His previous suspicions are proven correct: Lottie could barely exist while remembering the mouth of the beast in the ocean. She’s also disgusted with what she heard from the version of herself and the people she knew in the other world: “There’s no giant mouth rising to devour her. There’s only the face of her other-self and that unceasing monologue. Sometimes the speech returns to familiar ground-fantasies of her father’s friend, loathing of her sisters-other times, it ranges over new territory-fantasies of her father himself, loathing of her mother. Lottie has never heard anything like this, but it isn’t the shock of the language her other-self spits out that’s so disturbing. It’s not even the sheer strangeness of confronting another her. What is truly bad, in a way that pumps fresh meaning into that deflated word … is that each vile chapter in the other-Lottie’s fantasy of degradation evokes a response in her beyond simple revulsion. Every ugly assertion makes a part of Lottie jump with recognition. She’s no liar, this blank face. She’s telling the truth, giving voices to impulses Lottie hasn’t wanted to be aware she has.” (113). Langan writes that while the concept of unconscious and disturbing desires and the id is quite famous in today’s psychology, Lottie is especially horrified not just due to recognizing her hidden depravity (which every person has), but of her intense guilt, seeing that she felt she actually did what her other self said. Rainer then deals with the menace of Helen: he carves symbols on the house she was in to prevent her from leaving, as well as cutting off her source of power (from the house of the Guest). Rainer confirms that the Guest is responsible for reanimating Helen, and that he needs to interrogate her for information concerning him. He then goes into Helen’s house with Italo, two brothers, Angelo and Andrea, and Jacob Schmidt (an Austrian with a stutter who fancies Lottie, but was told by Rainer that he wouldn’t let him marry his daughter due to him being an Austrian). Langan then reveals that when Jacob later married Lottie, he was the one who told her of what happened that day with Helen and the Guest. It is also stated that Rainer later got a form of aggressive Alzheimer’s, seeing how it stripped his personality in a few months some years later, killing him. Regardless, before Rainer and the others entered Helen’s house, he carved symbols into axes which they borrowed from their employers to ward off Helen. Rainer states that Helen is weak, as he cut her off from the power that she relies on for quite some time already. When they entered the house, Jacob saw that she was docile, and was utterly soaked, causing her skin to have a reflective quality. Her eyes were indeed yellow with black pupils. Helen tries to save herself by attempting to tell Jacob something about him and Lottie, but is told to be silent by Rainer. Rainer systematically interrogates Helen, and she reveals that her master is the Fisherman and has come to capture the Leviathan. She tells him that he’s almost done preparing for the capture of the beast, and Rainer states that there is no way that he doesn’t have the power. Helen callously responds that she doesn’t care about him, and that she does as she is commanded. Rainer, satisfied with the information, does a hand motion, causing Helen to dissolve into water. The townspeople, seeing that the threat was neutralized, knock the house down and set it aflame: “The smoke that pours off the fire is heavy, almost viscous. Several observers are sickened by its smell, and one boy who stands too close to the plume will be deathly ill by sunset, his skin riddled with what look like toadstools pushing their way out of it. He’s the last fatality of this whole strange affair.” (128).
As they move towards the house of the Guest, Rainer reveals that the Guest (I’ll be calling him “the Fisherman” from now on) is centuries old. To elaborate, he came from Buda in Europe. His wife was a Turk, and since there was an armed conflict at the time, they decided to lie low: the Fisherman believed that they would be left alone if they didn't choose sides. However, he was wrong: when Hungarians retook the territory, they brutally slaughtered his wife and children and severely wounded him, although he survived. After burying his family, he fled to Vienna, and then Prague, the Elbe, Dresden, Magdeburg, Wittenberg, and Hamburg. In every location the Fisherman tried to meet magicians and sorcerers who could instruct him in magic (to bring back his dead family). As for his name, he’s known as the Fisherman due to his wanting to capture a powerful entity, seeing if he captures the Leviathan, he could receive the power needed to bring his family from the dead. He won a book, The Secret Words of Osiris (it was an Egyptian book that mentioned the Leviathan, though in a different name), from a magician named Kunrath, as he needed it as an instruction manual for capturing the Leviathan. Rainer then elaborates on the nature of the dark ocean: it’s another world altogether, and it's underneath everything, “‘as if the world is as flat as men once believed it to be and it is floating on the dark ocean. In places, the earth is thinner, the distance to the ocean not so great.’” (134). Of course, the reason the Fisherman came to see Cornelius was due to the area being very close to the dark ocean. When Rainer and the others made their way towards the house of the Fisherman, they found some of the water of the dark ocean around the house. Inside the water were humanoid creatures with intelligent yellow eyes, which Rainer fends off by using the symbol on his ax. When he and his comrades entered, they found that there was basically a forest in the house, seeing the presence of a large number of trees and other greenery. He then finds a watery stream and a ravine, causing them to realize that the house had been made into a gateway to somewhere else by the Fisherman. They discover that the world within the house is extremely large, as they are at the top of a very tall hill. They go downhill and find the dark ocean which houses the Leviathan: “This is an ocean whose water is dark, as if Jacob is seeing it at night, as if it’s made of night. It’s an ocean in storm. Even though the sky above is clear, the dark water lifts itself in frothing waves large as houses. Some of these burst on the jagged boulders that constitute the beach, shooting spray high into the air. Others smash into one another, larger waves sweeping over smaller ones, consuming them, rows of smaller waves angling into large ones, collapsing them.” (145). Rainer and the others go onto the beach, and they find a huge amount of blood: the blood came from the carcasses of cattle that were gigantic in stature (as big as a small elephant and with yellow skin). It turns out that the carcasses had been decapitated: their heads were removed to serve as bait for the Fisherman to ensnare the creature. Around the cattle are a vast amount of ropes that have been tied around severed trees. The Fisherman spots them, and Rainer and the others begin to cut the ropes open with their enchanted axes. To elaborate, when the ropes were severed, they emitted a large amount of energy. The Fisherman attacked them, using sorcery to make water deadly: he shot it in a focused stream at the throat of Angelo, brainwashing him. That is, his eyes began shimmering and turned yellow and he began coughing water. He began speaking a language that transported Jacob into the dark sea. The Fisherman, “Working over a length of time … [he] does not even want to consider … has cast his lines and lodged his hooks into the bulk of this immensity with a patience that’s equal measures mad and heroic. He has brought this monster, this god-beast, to the brink of complete capture” (151). Jacob breaks out of the trance and defends himself from Angelo, who was now a minion of the Fisherman. At the same time, he and the others tried to sever the ropes: one of the hooks pierced the skin of Jacob, lodging itself in his face. However, he was comparatively lucky, for some of the hooks unexpectedly embedded themselves into the skin of the Fisherman, catching him off guard. Jacob then kills Angelo in self-defense, not realizing that the Fisherman had just been defeated: “This is Jacob’s moment. Pivoting his hips to give the blow its maximum force, he swings the axe down. In the quarter-second it takes for the blade to traverse the arc up, down, and into the base of Angelo’s neck, where it joins the shoulder, Jacob watches Angelo’s eyes darken from gold to brown, the water slide off his face. STOP! His brain screams, but it’s too late. Already, the blade has reached Angelo’s skin. It cuts deep, through the muscle and collar bone, down to the edge of his breastbone. Blood vents from severed arteries. With a cry, Jacob releases the axe and stumbles back. The handle of the axe protruding up like some awkward new limb, blood bubbling red onto his shirt, Angelo attempts to raise himself to his feet … he slumps over … Blood pattering the soil, Angelo lurches into a half-crawl … He manages to place one madly trembling hand forward before his arm gives out, dropping his face into the dirt that’s already damp with his blood. His mouth opens and closes, opens and closes, opens and remains open.” (153). Although Angelo died, the Fisherman was temporarily incapacitated: the fishhooks on his skin drags him into the dark sea (Rainer prevented him from removing the hooks by using the back end of his axe to break his bones). The Fisherman, knowing that he wasn’t going to escape from the ocean for a while, curses at Rainer and his friends and their families. When the Fisherman reached the ocean, he quoted Moby Dick, telling Rainer and the rest of them that he loathes them and will spit his last breath at them. In the end, “A wall of water crashes down on him. Jacob loses sight of him in the resulting foam, and doesn’t regain it until the Fisherman has been carried a dozen yards from shore. Amidst the rioting waves, it’s difficult to distinguish much with any certainty, but Jacob could swear he sees the Fisherman grasped by a multitude of silvery arms; it’s impossible for him to say if they’re holding the man up, or dragging him under. Then he’s gone, taken by the water.” (155).
Although the Fisherman was defeated, Jacob was severely tormented by guilt, vomiting upon seeing Angelo’s corpse and desiring to be punished. However, he wasn’t: they used Angelo’s blood (the blood of an innocent) to sever the rest of the ropes on the shore. When they were done, Rainer told those present that they had postponed the Fisherman’s plan, seeing that it’s easier to tear down than to build up. However, he admits that they have not foiled the Fisherman’s plan in the slightest: they merely bought themselves the time to live out the rest of their lives. In Rainer’s own words, “‘we have won a great victory … We have removed the threat to our families. We have disrupted the Fisherman’s plans. And we have caught the Fisherman himself, trapped him using his own tools. If we are lucky, then the great beast he is bound to will break free and swim into the ocean, taking him with it. If we are not so lucky, then he will find his way free before that. Even if such is the case, though, it will be the work of decades for him to escape the prison we have locked him into.’” (162). They conducted some prayers for Angelo before leaving his body unburied, as the pathway to the world they were acquainted with wasn’t guaranteed to hold. On the way up the mountain, Jacob became exhausted, and found himself incapable of running any farther. However, Rainer fixed that by implying that he could marry Lottie, giving Jacob the strength and motivation he needed to successfully leave the area and to reenter what was once the Dort House. On the way out, he saw the Leviathan’s extreme size and witnessed it leave into the dark ocean. When Rainer and the others made their way into the world they were used to, they saw that the walls of water around the house were gone, as well as the creatures within them. Rainer tells everyone present that it is quite likely they will live the rest of their lives in peace, and that they should count themselves as fortunate to have survived. When Italo inquired about the possibility that the Fisherman would exact retaliation on their descendants, Rainer answered in a way typical for a human (that is, short-sighted, callous, and selfish), telling him that they’ll be dead by that point. Later, when people came to inform the Fisherman that he needs to leave the house due to the will of Cornelius, they found that the house was abandoned and a wreck, as it was covered with grass and was suffering from disrepair. The Sheriff, upon entering the house, saw a webbed hand coming from the door that led to the dark ocean and the beach: concerned, he speedily left and stated that the house was off-limits. The house is then set aflame. When the remnants of the house were taken apart, they decided to move the trees surrounding it to another area to repave the land. One of the trees uprooted revealed a shining rock: “What the crew can see of its surface is faceted, quartz-like. One of the pair at the bar claims to have stared into one of those facets and seen a distant, fiery eye looking back at him” (172). The crew who found it left the rock there, seeing how they found it at the end of the day and how it was still entangled in the roots of the tree it was under. The next day, however, the gem was gone. At the end of the day, Helen and George’s children continued to live with Italo and Regina. Regina dies of malignant uterus cancer, but Italo is still able to function. The Reservoir was eventually completed, and by that time Jacob married Lottie and had a child, Greta, with her (why they would do so after realizing that there is a malevolent other world waiting to consume their souls upon their respective deaths is beyond me - it’s possible they needed to affirm their lives after witnessing the truth of the world, seeing that dwelling on it would crush them, hearkening back to what Langan wrote about the truth being too much to bear). Rainer secured a position with the Water Authority (right before WWI - it’s quite impressive, seeing how he’s a German). Rainer and his wife Clara went to “Woodstock, to a modest house a couple of doors down from Lottie and Jacob, whose family has expanded to include a son, also Jacob, and another daughter, Clara. Christina, Rainer and Clara’s youngest, has scandalized everyone by falling pregnant with the child of a much older man who has come north from Beacon to tend to his sick brother. After a hasty wedding, Christina and Tom head back down the Hudson to settle. Gretchen, the middle sister, attends the teacher’s college in Huguenot, and takes a position teaching in Rhinebeck. She’ll marry late, a railroad conductor with whom she develops a romance over the course of trips to Manhattan to visit the museums there. Life goes on. That’s the remarkable thing, isn’t it?” (177). Jacob became a successful creator of headstones, and Italo eventually died of a heart attack.
Rainer, as stated before, succumbed to Alzheimer’s. However, before he fully succumbed to it, he made his way to Dutchman’s Creek (after learning that no one knew where its water came from - an old man who was lost in the woods for up to three days claimed that he saw a dark ocean in the trees up Dutchman’s Creek) with Jacob. At the creek, Jacob heard the voice of Angelo taunting and cursing him bitterly for taking his life: although he murdered him, he still lived a good life, while his was cut short beforehand for no reason. Angelo’s voice revealed that the black ocean’s waves carried his corpse into the ocean, and “picked up his body and carried it far, far out, to the lightless depths where white demons sport amidst the coils of their great and terrible master. He was damned” (182). This caused Jacob to feel so guilty that he contemplated drowning in the stream, but he decided not to, as Rainer stopped him. Rainer reveals that he hears the voice of his late colleague Wilhelm Vanderwort. To elaborate, the reason he was thrown out of the university he taught in was that he indirectly took Wilhelm’s life: Wilhelm was a philologist like him and was also intelligent, though he was more passionate and capable of quick insights while Rainer was more prone to analysis over long stretches of time. Rainer came across a book in French that included magical rituals, and he shared the contents with Wilhelm. They came across another book and did some translations, realizing that speaking words in a certain language that was woven into the very fabric of reality were capable of calling the thing mentioned into the presence of the person saying the words. He eventually came into contact with a group of sorcerers who were well-acquainted with worlds beyond, and was told with Wilhelm that if they wanted to join their community, they needed to prove themselves. They proceeded by bringing them into a basement that led to an alleyway of a city in another world: “‘There are cities built along the shores of the black ocean. This was one of them. It was neither the largest nor the oldest of these places, but it was of sufficient size and age for our instructors’ purposes … Our mission was simple: we were to make our way to the other side of the city, where we would find its necropolis. There, we were to locate a certain grave, and pluck from it a flower we would find growing in its soil. This was not as easy as you might suppose. Not only was the flower rare, it was regarded by the city’s populace as the soul of the priest who was buried under it. To remove such a plant was considered a mix of heresy and murder. The streets were full of police, tall shapes dressed in black cloaks and wearing masks fashioned to resemble the curved beaks of birds of prey; they were armed with long, curved knives, which they would use without hesitation on any they caught engaged in a criminal activity such as ours. The geography of the city was strange, contradictory. Streets ended unexpectedly in blank walls, or climbed bridges which came to a stop high in the air; they arrived at circular courtyards from which a dozen alleyways branched out. We had to guide ourselves by the stars burning overhead. These were not arranged in the familiar constellations. Here, the images they drew had been given names such as the Rider, the Staff, and the Garland of Fruit.” (186-7). They made their way to the tomb and got the flower: they were instructed to put the flower in a piece of cloth from the foot of a burial shroud, but Wilhelm didn't listen to the instructions, deciding to carry it on his person without the adequate protection, making light of the warning he received by telling Rainer that it wasn’t a big deal. When they made their way to their instructors, they were celebrated. However, Wilhelm, who failed to listen to the instructions, poisoned himself with the essence of the flower. He eventually disintegrated into dust and darkness (his body revealed nothing but emptiness while it was crumbling apart). After this incident, Rainer left the university and departed for America, seeing how his reputation was ruined. Rainer himself knew that he was complicit in his death: when Vanderwort laughed at him, he decided not to press him to follow the instructions of their instructors, as he was angry at him for his perceived mockery and was also envious of some of his skills. At Dutchman’s Creek, Rainer hears the voice of Wilhelm: it accuses him of being a coward, seeing how he threw away the knowledge they strove so hard for after his death. “‘Now he is dust, dust which remembers what it was to be a man and can do nothing with that knowledge. He curses me. He damns me as a coward and a fraud.’” (188). To prevent passerby from falling victim to the influence of Dutchman’s Creek, Rainer carves a symbol onto a tree that will turn away any person who looks at it. Jacob died from lung cancer, and Lottie survived him. Herman’s story ends with the statement that Lottie showed Reverend Mapple the hook that pierced Jacob’s cheek. After hearing Herman’s story, Abe and Dan left the diner and still went to Dutchman’s Creek, as Dan said that the story was obviously false.
When they got to Dutchman’s Creek, Abe correctly ascertained that Dan went there in an attempt to reconnect with his deceased loved ones, as he probably heard of the legends surrounding the area. Abe notes that Dutchman’s Creek is a good place to fish, and when he threw a lure, he quickly caught a massive fish that had a bizarre appearance. That is, when it was secured on land, “The fish’s face … was rounded, its eyes a pair of large, forward-facing sockets. No doubt, its resemblance to a human skull had factored into my initial shock at its appearance. What I’d been too concerned with bringing the thing in to realize was that the face wasn’t shaped like a skull, it was shaped around a skull. Imagine a good-sized fish, something like a salmon, whose head has been cut away. In its place, someone has set a human skull, stretching the fish’s skin over the bone to hold it there. Finally, whoever has performed this bizarre transplant has given his new creation a mouth, a slit at the bottom of its face whose bloodless gums are jammed with fangs like a drawer of knives.” (210). Dan reveals that he got the name of Dutchman’s Creek from his grandfather’s fishing journal: he mentioned in his diary that when he went to Dutchman’s Creek, he saw his wife (Dan’s grandmother), who had been dead for eight-and-a-half years at that point in time. Dan admits that he is full of guilt and sorrow over the death of his family, and tells Dan that he can see Marie again if Dutchman’s Creek really is supernatural in nature. He then runs upstream to find the source of the water, and Abe follows, only to find Marie. Marie appeared to be in the prime of her life, though her skin was pale and her eyes were yellow. She appeared to act normally in the beginning, and he copulated with her, seeing that he desperately missed her company. After having intercourse with her, he looked at her face once again, only to be horrified to find that it had utterly changed: “What was sharing the forest floor with me had the same gold eyes, but the rest of its face might have leapt out of a nightmare. Its nose was flat, the nostrils a pair of slits over a broad mouth whose lower jaw jutted forward, exposing the row of daggered teeth lining it. Its hair was stringy, a mane of tendrils. The hand it rested on my chest was webbed, each thick finger capped by a heavy claw. Its mouth opened, and gave forth a sigh of post-coital contentment.” (221). Abe, horrified, tried to escape, but his pants caused him to land hard on his rear. Despite his terror, he communicated with Marie, and was told that she was a “reflection” of her (whatever that means). Marie says that the fish he caught was a nymph, and also told him to follow her upstream. She then tells him that Dan came to the beach, and that he should follow if he wants to see him. As Dan walked with Marie to the beach, he recognized that he and Dan were alike: both were very desperate to recoup their losses and to attempt to regain what they had lost. The path Dan and Marie walked on eventually became composed of huge stones, and he came across a statue of a goddess, the Mother (the statue was very pregnant and missing its head). Dan then finds that the trees around him were tall and had blades for leaves: “The rough bark that wrapped the trunk held what light there was and shone a dull bronze; the leaves clustered above it seemed to pass different shades of green back and forth amongst themselves. As I approached the tree, a citrus smell, like oranges on the turn, saturated the air. The individual leaves were shaped like spearheads, their edges serrated.” (225). Abe and Marie soon came across a past vision of the Fisherman: Marie, to give him some encouragement, changed her form to be ghastly and screamed at him until he began crying and ran back in the direction of the beach to catch the Leviathan (as expected, time works much differently in the other world - it can speed up as well as show things that happened in the past). When Abe was on the beach, he came across the carcasses of massive oxen: they’re known as Oxen of the Sun. Marie reveals that their heads have been used for the Fisherman as bait for the Leviathan (also known as “Apep”). Abe soon came to the edge of the woods of the serrated trees and found himself in front of the dark ocean. Abe soon saw Dan with his wife and children, as well as many ropes that have been aligned strategically. He then saw a huge boulder near the ocean: a man who was very old had tied himself to it. In Langan’s own words, “The strangest thing was, I recognized this man. I’d met him in the woods on the way here, speaking a language I didn't understand, until Marie chased him off. What had been a matter of an hour, less, for me, had been much, much longer for him. At a glance, you might have mistaken him for my age, a tad older, but subject him to closer inspection, and the number of years piled on him was apparent. This fellow had seen enough time pass that he should have crumbled to dust several times over. His skin was more like parchment paper, and his face was speckled with some kind of barnacle. All the color had been washed from his eyes. They flicked toward me, and a spark of recognition flared in them.” (231). Dan explained to Abe that the man attached to the boulder was the Fisherman, and that he doesn’t talk to anyone due to how focused he is on securing the Leviathan (he’s very close, but he’s at a stalemate). He then explains that the Fisherman requires strength from him and Abe: if they give him the energy he needs to take the Leviathan, they’ll get their families back. He also discusses the Fisherman’s story: “‘He lost his wife, too-his family,’” “‘In front of him-in his house-he watched Hungarian soldiers butcher his wife and children, beat and hack them to death with clubs and swords, axes. The soldiers stabbed him first, when they broke down the door, so there was nothing he could do to stop them. He listened to his wife begging for their children’s lives; he heard his children screaming as they were murdered. He saw their bodies split open, their blood, their...insides, their organs spilled on the floor. Everything that was good in his life was ripped from him. If he could have, he would have died there, with them, in the house whose walls had been painted with their blood. But he survived, and afterwards, once he had finished burying his family, he set off to find the means to get them back, to reclaim them from the axes and swords that had cut them from him.” (234).
Dan then reveals that the Fisherman was able to unmask reality for what it was, and found the beach and the dark ocean. Dan reveals he has been at the beach for days: as said before, time is flexible. Dan says that he won’t leave the beach, as he wants to stay with his family. Abe tells Dan that he wouldn’t give the Fisherman his strength, as he says that he’ll be dead eventually himself, and that he’ll reunite with Marie once that happens. Dan pleads with Abe not to refuse, seeing how the Fisherman may need more than his energy to succeed. He alleges that if he loses his wife and his children, he won’t survive, and that he needs Abe as a friend to agree to the Fisherman’s request. The Fisherman briefly turned his attention towards Abe, filling him with intense emotion: “the Fisherman’s eyes … was threaded with currents of emotion so powerful they were visible. There was rage, a short man in a dirty tunic and pants gripping his sword two-handed and swinging it down onto the back of a tall woman with long brown hair as she bent over the bodies of her children. There was pain, that same woman and children lying mutilated in wide pools of blood. There was hope, a suggestive passage in what might have been Greek, beneath a woodcut of a fanciful sea-serpent, sporting amidst stylized waves. There was determination, a knock on yet another door to ask yet another old man or woman if they were in possession of certain books. The emotions flowed into a current whose name I couldn’t give; if pressed, I would have said something like want, a gap or crack through the very core of the man. It was what had sustained this man when he had been dragged into the black ocean by one of the ropes he had employed in catching what he’d once glimpsed in a book. It had allowed him to struggle against the great beast, to reach through this underplace to a place that lay deeper still, and to draw on what he found there until he could begin to bring the monster that had broken free of his control once more under his sway. It had permitted him to rope himself to this rock as ballast to hold the beast. Sudden and overwhelming, the impression swept over me that the figure I was seeing was only part of the Fisherman, and a fairly small one, at that. The greater portion of him, I understood, was out of view, a giant with the marble skin and blank eyes of a classical sculpture. The apprehension was terrifying, made more so by the other emotions that impressed themselves on me: an amusement bitter as lemon, and a malice keen as the edge of a razor.” (237). When Dan realized that Abe wasn’t going to change his mind, he became enraged, almost killing him by using a rock to attempt to render him unconscious. Abe took out a knife he brought with him, and defended himself when Dan tried to attack him by stabbing him. Dan, bleeding, momentarily stopped, and what was once his family, seeing the blood around him, devoured him with their sharp teeth. Horrified, Abe escaped by running back to the world he knew. As he made his way off the beach, many entities with gold eyes watched his escape. Abe then saw the eye of the Leviathan: “There was no emotion to it. What streamed from the enormous eye was either so deep below or so high above any discrete sentiment as to be unrecognizable as such. There was only absence, a void as big and grand as everything. It wasn’t white, or black; it wasn’t anything. Perfect in its nothingness, its nullity, it had been contravened, somehow, sundered, confined to the form before me. Imprisoned, but not separated, it was the black ocean, and the pale creatures grasping the lines that held it, and the Fisherman tied to his rock, and me. To understand this, to appreciate it, might be the beginning of a kind of wisdom.” (243). Unfortunately for Abe, he accidentally exposed his arms to the trees, and felt wounds opening up in various places. Out of his mind, he escaped quickly from the world of the dark sea and fell into a regular stream. He was able to swim, but was dragged down by Marie. While he initially considered accepting his fate and dying, he decided to live and broke free of her grasp and was able to pull himself onto land before passing out from exertion and horror.
Abe was found by some passerby and brought to a hospital: while there, he raved endlessly in a semi-conscious state of what had happened to Dan. The police suspected due to his ravings and Dan’s disappearance that he had murdered him: Abe, knowing they wouldn’t believe his story, told them a narrative they would like to hear due to its realism. That is, he told them that he and Dan went there for a chance to see their dead loved ones. However, there was a flood, causing the ground to become slippery. While he and Dan were ascending up the hill, he accidentally fell into the water, becoming conscious only when waking in the hospital. The police, deciding his story was a plausible one, accepted it. Abe was later laid off from his company, and was given a chance to voluntarily resign for a monetary reward beforehand, which he gladly took. His retirement had much free time, and he spent a good amount of time doing random things, as well as eating with Frank Block, one of his coworkers who was fired from the same company. Eventually, a family with a young girl named Sadie came over. Sadie was very interested in fishing, and Abe taught her many tricks and showed her good locations to go to. He then recollects on Dan and the tendency of humans to believe in lies, so long as they bring comfort: “there must have been a moment when Dan had seen Sophie and the boys for what they were, had glimpsed their true faces, if only for a second. He must have realized that, even if these creatures were what remained of his wife and children, they had been changed, transformed by their passage out of this life into something else, something fundamentally different from him. He must have known that he was buying into a scenario that was, on some level, a lie, and he had been willing to sacrifice the reality of friendship, however mundane, in favor of that lie … the world’s full of folks who’ve done the same, if not in as dramatic a fashion.” (251). The area Abe lived in saw flooding, and in the middle of October of 2002, there was a day and a half of massive rain and powerful winds that caused the streams around his house to become raging rivers. Sadie and her family were outside of town while it happened (they were looking at potential colleges for her and her older sister), and Abe promised to look after their belongings. Before the storm came, he checked their house to make sure everything was okay. He then retreated into his house and relaxed for a while before the power went out. The moment the electricity went out he lit the candles, and Dan appeared to him: like the other people who had died and began their new lives, his skin was extremely pale and his eyes were yellow. Dan reveals that those like him can travel to people via sources of water, hence why he was able to go to him during the tremendous flood. Dan tells Abe that he was the reason he was like this, and Abe responds by telling him that he did it to himself. Before Dan could attack him, Abe took out a can of cooking spray and sprayed him with pressurized oil, which, in combination with the candles, lit him aflame. In agony, Dan escaped and threw himself into the stream, disappearing completely. When Abe went to investigate, he saw that the water offered a projection of the dark sea: “People-rows and rows of people floated there, most of them submerged to their shoulders, a few to their chins, fewer still to their eyes. I couldn’t guess their number, because they extended into the deeper dark. Their skin was damp, white, their hair lank, their eyes gleaming gold. It didn't take me long to pick out Marie in the midst of them, not as close as I would have supposed. Her face was blank, as were those of the children to either side of her. A girl and a boy, their features in that in-between stage when childhood is beginning to make way for adolescence. Their mouths were open; I glimpsed rows of serrated teeth. Their eyes were vacant of any intelligence. They had, I fancied, my mother’s nose.” (263). That is, when Abe copulated with Marie in the woods near Dutchman’s Creek, he accidentally fathered two children that were akin to the other creatures in the dark ocean.
Personal thoughts:
The Fisherman by John Langan is a powerful, dark, imaginative, and shocking book, making it an extremely enjoyable one to read. Langan’s imagination is vivid and powerful, and I especially appreciate how he handles the topic of the afterlife in the world of his novel: while many people would assume the afterlife, if it exists, to be one of bliss, Langan shows that humans are in fact almost completely ignorant as to how the world actually works, and that nothing is promised to us at all, seeing our insignificance in the eyes of creatures like the Leviathan that live in the dark sea and beyond. Langan masterfully captures the concept of grief and of the human denial of the finality of death, making this book only more powerful. I enjoy how he characterizes the Fisherman: although one can sympathize with him to some degree, seeing the horrible losses he survived, it must not be forgotten how he ruined many lives over the centuries. I also appreciate the concept of the Leviathan, the dark ocean, and the cities near the dark sea, seeing that although they’re not thoroughly discussed (ex. the true nature and size of the Leviathan, how big the dark ocean is and how deep it actually goes, and the inhabitants of the cities and the laws within them), Langan leaves much mystery for the reader to figure out on their own, which is much appreciated from an imaginary lense. I highly recommend The Fisherman to anyone interested in cosmic horror, imaginative works, books dealing with human emotion, especially sorrow, realistic and relatable characters, and powerful imagery.
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