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    The Fisherman
    The Fisherman
    The Fisherman
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Fisherman

    Written by John Langan

    Narrated by Danny Campbell

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 11, 2017
    ISBN9781541472242
    The Fisherman
    Author

    John Langan

    John Langan is the author of two novels and five collections of stories. For his work, he has received the Bram Stoker and This Is Horror Awards. He is one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with his family and certainly not too many books.  

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    Reviews for The Fisherman

    4/5

    383 ratings22 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The Fisherman is amazing. The story is terrifying, and its style lends itself well to the format. Danny Campbell's haunting narration gives it an intimacy that is breathtaking.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      The last few words of every chapter were cut off

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I don’t know what I was expecting, but this was a hell of a tale.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Brilliant. May be the best book I've read this year.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The owner of the used bookstore I went to until they closed threw this one in my bag of mostly Stephen King hardcovers. He raved about it....but on my shelf it sat for years. Finally I was looking through my books. I saw it and gave it a chance telling myself I'll give it a half hour. I read it all in one sitting. Great book. 5/5
    • 2/5
      DNF 55%

      This was an ok story about two widowers becoming friends over fishing with some spooky foreboding. Unfortunately, it then became a loooong convoluted flashback to Victorian(?) Europe with shades of the occult. Had there been fewer characters or shorter scenes it may have worked. But we go from two character first-person to multicast third-person and my give a damn waned to nothing.
    • 3/5
      The Fisherman is basically the lovechild of Melville and Lovecraft, and as a fan of both, I figured this would be right up my alley. Like most other reviewers have noted, this book has a bit of a pacing issue. 3/5ths of the book function as a flashback that contextualizes the rest of the novel. While Langan is a very talented writer and his prose is absolutely beautiful in parts, the sluggish pacing and meandering plot caused my interest to fizzle. It is an interesting yarn, but not as tightly woven and memorable as I had hoped.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book and I honestly wasn't expecting
    • 4/5
      After having suffered tragic losses, Abe and Dan take to fishing for consolation. Following a hard winter, Dan suggests fishing at a new place Abe has never heard of: Dutchman's Creek. On the way there, they stop at a diner for breakfast, where they hear from the cook a long, strange, and unbelievable story about the place. This novel has the story-within-a-story format, not one of my favorite conceits, but it works here because of the old-fashioned style of the storytelling: part Washington Irving, part Herman Melville, part H. P. Lovecraft. Needless to say, Abe and Dan don't heed the warnings and go on to Dutchman's Creek, where they encounter something terrible. I can't say that I completely understood what was happening at the end, but the unusual and horrific imagery of the final scenes more than made up for that. A solid horror tale.
    • 4/5
      A straight up spooky story. The narration is excellent. The editing of the audio could be better as some of the chapters cut off on the last word.
    • 5/5
      An absolute marvel of a novel. It's horror, yes, but also so much more. Langan is a master of voice and tone, and his characters are realized with a rare economy of language that still gives them more life than most. This is a book fore everyone, whether you're a horror fan or not.
    • 5/5
      This book was incredible and the narrator was too! His voice at times reminded me of Willem Dafoe
    • 5/5
      *The Fisherman* by John Langan is one of the most gripping Lovecraftian novels I have read in a very long time. As a fan of the genre, I've read plenty of interesting takes on cosmic horror, but *The Fisherman* is by far the most effective. Right from the off, you are invested in the characters and the layers of the story, with each section of the tale being as captivating as what preceded it.This is very much the sort of book that is perfect on a cold, and rainy night. You'll open it and find that several hours have passed by. Peak cosmic horror at its best. Can't wait to read more of John Langan's work.
    • 4/5
      Great story within a story.

      After his wife's untimely death, Abe takes up fishing as a sort of therapy. Eventually he's joined by a co-worker, Dan, who also lost his entire family in a terrible car accident.

      After a period of time, Dan suggests a new fishing spot. On the way they stop at a local bar and are told the horrifying myths surrounding that particular fishing spot - along with a warning to go literally anywhere else to fish.

      Since you know going in this is a horror story, you know darn well that they two men don't heed the warning and bad things happen. Not really a spoiler, but in case any reader would be surprised at this turn...

      This was a skillfully told "story within a story", but by the time we get to the crisis you already suspect what will happen, but still a great read!
    • 5/5
      I thought this a superb horror novel and finished it in two days. It's a great example of what the kids today call "cosmic horror," but it is not so Lovecraftian (H. P. Lovecraft being cosmic horror's exemplar) as to seem like a pastiche, or an homage, or anything like that. Langan also, thank goodness, avoids any tie-in to Judaeo-Christian anything, which means that, outlandish as the mythology behind the book may seem, I can't reject it out of hand because it's something I've rejected already.There were occasional places where I thought Langan's reach exceeded the power of his prose, but the book is well-written and Langan is a very thoughtful guy (I am listening to a podcast called "Talking Scared" and he is certainly steeped in his chosen genre's history and traditions). I'm looking forward to reading more by him.If the big beasties and inter-dimensional reverberations of 'cosmic' horror don't automatically make you roll your eyes and say "c'mon ... gimme a good ol' fashioned vampire," give The Fisherman a shot. It's really, really good, and deserves its reputation.
    • 4/5
      I'm not sure I would have ever picked up this book if it wasn't for one of my book clubs choosing it. And what a shame that would have been. If ever a mythical horror slow-burn could be labelled as "cozy", this would be it. Though it begins with fresh real-life horror and grief and slowly turns to the most fantastical horror imaginable, as the reader you feel safe in the author's hands. As if he's not trying to scare you, just trying to share what he knows. The beastly horrors, while perhaps few and far between, are intense and graphic in a way that sticks with you. But the moments of line casting and reflection always allow you to catch your breath.Truly a beautiful, horrible experience.
    • 3/5
      Pretty creepy; 3.5 stars.
      This reminded me very much of Stephen King books; The over the top fantastic creatures and world the author created. From the beginning of the book, I was prejudiced towards the tale, because of the fishing going on throughout the book. Never is the subject brought up that fish can feel pain. Though I fished as a child, and my father took myself and my daughters to an Indian reservation in New Mexico to fish, my father later gave up fishing, as he came to believe that fish have souls. As for myself, I've observed horrible practices in the fishing industry. I'm a vegan, By the way.

      The protagonist, and his fishing buddy dan, both worked at IBM. I remember my ex-husband talking about the fact that IBM used to take care of their employees. That if you worked for ibm, you had a job for life. That later changed, as noted in this part of chapter 3:
      "before long, his job was in serious jeopardy. He'd been team leader on a pair of important projects, one of which demoted him, while the other dropped him outright. The company had changed. This was not, as management had started trumpeting, your father's ibm, which I guess meant it wasn't my ibm. The notion of a corporate family that took care of its own and in so doing earned their loyalty was on the way out, evicted by simple greed. What this meant practically speaking was that Dan could not be assured of the same understanding and indulgence I had received more than a decade prior." (When the protagonist had lost his wife, and gotten a 3-month grief leave. He managed to pull it together in time to go back to work, but when Dan lost his wife and twin boys, he couldn't pull himself together.)

      When a member of the camp (families of men who are working on the damn) wife is run over by a mule cart, he goes to the dark side to try to get his wife back:
      "...helen, the Dead woman, The woman who wasn't dead and isn't any longer, is standing there on her ruined legs, looks at regina, then looks at the room she's guarding. She says, 'the children.'
      The sound of her voice is something awful. It's hard, raspy, as if it hasn't been used in a while, which I guess it hasn't. It's kind of liquidy, too, as if Helen's speaking from underwater. There's something else, a quality to the woman's voice Regina will have a hard time putting her finger on when she relates Helen's visit to her husband and his friend. She has an accent, Regina will say at last, but who doesn't have an accent in this place? It's not the accent the woman had when she was alive, no, not like what any of them has, moving from one tongue to another. This accent 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. it's not the way you'd think a dog or cat would speak, either. It's the voice you'd give a lizard, or an eel."

      Dan wants to go to Dutchman's creek, because he had read in his grandfather's journal, after he had lost his wife, that his grandfather had seen his wife there. Thus, Dan figures he can find his wife there. He's obsessed with the idea. the two men arrive at a fishing spot, and Dan takes off to the left, up the creek, and the protagonist wanders down in opposite direction. He sees what looks to be his dead wife, and has sex with her:
      "head swimming, I eased myself off Marie and onto my back. Once upon a time, I would have cracked a joke -- at the very least, said, 'I love you.' But nothing I could think of seemed appropriate - adequate. Truth to tell, there wasn't a whole lot of organized activity happening between my ears. The conflagration roaring through me had blown out, extinguished by the finish to Marie's and my lovemaking, leaving me empty, scoured and scorched by its ferocity. Aware of her beside me, I gazed up at the trees pointing to the clouds overhead, blinking at the rain that made it through the lattice of branches. Mother of pearl, on the clouds struck me as blindingly beautiful. My mind a pleasant blank, I turned to marie.
      What was sharing the forest floor with me had the same gold eyes, but the rest of its face might have leaped out of a nightmare. It's 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. It's 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 open, it gave forth a sigh of postcoital contentment.
    • 5/5
      John Langan is a new author for me and one that I will certainly be returning to. The heart and soul of this novel is a fundamental human emotion...grief and the desire to have one last conversation with a deceased loved one in order to say all of the things that never got said when they were alive. If such a thing were possible, what price would you be willing to pay since we all know that there is no such thing as a free lunch? I've always been a huge fan of ghost stories and horror literature...so it is very seldom that I read a book that has the power to transfix and produce such an uneasy after effect as this one did. If you love or even slightly like this type of story find this book and submerge yourself in one dark, frightening but tantalizing tale.
    • 1/5
      I was with the book 50% of the way through, and then it kind of loses its grip with the story-within-a-story almost feeling like it's never going to end. And when it does end and Langan resumes the main storyline it feels like too much buildup for events that are really quite silly when you think about it.
    • 4/5
      John Langan's The Fisherman is a dark, brooding beast of a horror novel.

      The story revolves around Abe and Dan, two men joined together by heartbreak and their love for fishing. The specter of the local legend of Dutchman's Creek draw them both, where a man's obsession, and the power of one's grief, threatens to dismantle everything.

      Imaginative, creepy, Lovecraftian, and also, oddly enough, deeply personal at times.
    • 4/5
      This was a slow-burning horror story about two men who have each suffered terrible loss and find solace in fishing together. One suffers from a deep depression and talks the other into fishing at the hard to find Dutchman's creek. There is a reason that this creek is hard to find and they will come to regret looking for it. This novel worked for me, but I could see how it might not for others. The first part of the novel is the backstory of the two men's respective losses and introduces in the creek. Then a second tale starts of them being warned of what happened in the creek in the previous century, which starts the horror part of the novel. Once we get back to the tale of the two men the novel stays firmly in the horror category right to the last page!
    • 5/5
      The slow methodical pace of The Fisherman builds the suspense to an extremely high level. Excellent characters and a wonderful haunting story.