Review: The Fisherman

All the same, those details. If, as the saying goes, that’s where the devil is, then half of hell seemed to be crowded into this story.

The Fisherman by John Langan is a slow-burn cosmic horror with some of the most arresting imagery I’ve read in recent memory.

There’s more than a passing nod to Moby Dick here, from the opening sentence—“Don’t call me Abraham: call me Abe.”—to the dense, rambling narrative style, to the titular character’s nature and motivation, but it’s Melville by way of Lovecraft, and once it hits its stride, it works.

That said, it’s slow at the start, and I admit I almost DNF’d it early on. The prose is wordy and sometimes feels unfocused in a way that would normally make me think it needs more editing, except that here this feels like a very purposeful aesthetic choice: it’s framed as, and written like, a fisherman’s tall tale, delivered orally in that winding way stories of that kind often are, with repetitions and backtracks and diversions galore.

I pressed on because I had seen so many great reviews for it, and once the concept fully takes its shape—at around the halfway point—there was no turning back. There is some incredible imagery in the back half of this book, and it whipsawed from slow-burn to breathless page-turner like the sudden snap of a taut fishing line.

If you’re in the mood for literary cosmic horror with a hint of the mythic, you’ll feel right at home with this one.

Fun fact: the cover for this edition is based on Albert Bierstadt’s 1870 painting Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast, which you can currently see at the Seattle Art Museum, and it is absolutely breathtaking in person.