Friends of the Barron 2: The Fisherman by John Langan

May 10, 2025

Note 1: As always, this series is filled with spoilers, and contains affiliate links to buy the book in question.

Note 2: This was initially written in October 2024, but for reasons that will become obvious, I didn't release it at that time and instead made it apart of this series. For that reason, much of my analysis is a little more surface level than I’d like, still… I can’t bring myself to rewrite it. I hope you will understand.

Note 3: Any attempt to look at the books written by Laird's friends and influences in my mind has to begin with John Langan, and any look at the work of John Langan has to begin with The Fisherman. Please ignore that this is technically speaking the second in the Friends of the Barron series, since the first of those is basically an inside joke. It's complicated. If you want to read it though, I'll leave a link at the end of this post for the super nerds.

John Langan’s The Fisherman is a book I intended to read for some time. I’d read The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and other Monstrous Geographies, a few years before and it was good enough for me to swear that I'd revisit Langan "someday," but not so good that I was in rush to do so. Not every story from that collection worked for me, some were too experimental, but “Technicolor” imprinted itself in my imagination and The Wide, Carnivorous Sky’s premise was more than enough to make me want to revisit his work in the future. Fast forward almost 3 years, and I finally got around to the book that the internet has been recommending to me on the regular, and I must say: They were absolutely right. I should have been here a long time ago.

For those who are reading this as a loose continuation of the Laird Barron read-along on Reddit, I want to say that Langan has a very different style to Barron. Barron likes to write gritty tales, weird tales, reminiscent of authors like Robert E. Howard, Robert Aickman, Raymond Chandler, and Roger Zelazny. His characters are blue collar sorts, detectives, criminals, abusers, and the abused. These men and women are comfortable with violence, or at the very least, used to it. This familiarity with violence is then an opportunity to show either how outmatched these men and women are, or to give them a fighting chance against monsters of the outer darkness.

Langan, by comparison, has a style much more similar to Lovecraft by way of Shirley Jackson. While his characters occasionally have military backgrounds, they tend to be white collar types and academics. His stories don’t tend to be scary, so much as haunting. The cosmic horror aesthetic is a tool, a distraction Langan can use to deliver a much more intimate horror. If your favorite Barron stories are things like “Redfield Girls,” “Parallax,” and “The Forest.” I think you’ll like what is on offer in the Fisherman. However, if you are expecting something like “Hand of Glory,” “The Men from Porlock,” or “Hallucigenia,” you might want to look elsewhere.

Summary

Abraham is an IBM employee from when that meant something. When it was still a good company. An older man, he fell in love and married a young coworker named Marie. On their honeymoon, though, she finds a lump in her breast. Cancer. It eats at her for a couple of years before she succumbs. Stricken with grief, Abe turns to the one thing he can still enjoy doing: fishing. Strange, since he never loved it early on, but it calls to him and he enjoys it, spending the next few years burying his grief in several waterways throughout Upstate New York. A couple of years later, Abe meets Dan, again, through work. Dan recently lost his family in a car accident and has been burying his grief in work. Abe, somewhat unintentionally, invites Dan fishing and Dan agrees. Together, they spend the next couple of years when they aren’t working fishing, though the Winter months are hard on them both without their outlet. Eventually Dan invites Abe to “Dutchman’s Creek” a small waterway barely visible on the map. On the way, they stop at a diner they are both familiar with and are warned off from the creek by the owner, Howard, who tells them about the creek’s history.

Apparently, the region used to be home to several towns before New York decided to dam up the valley. One village was “led” by one Cornelius Dort, a favored son of the region by virtue of wealth alone, being rather waspish and mercenary in spirit. Cornelius had married a girl who he seemed to love, and some of his sharper edges dulled for a time. After she died, he broke apart, returning somewhat to his previous tendencies and becoming more withdrawn. Soon after, a man in black arrived in the village, and there are rumors of a woman, implied to be Cornelius dead wife, walking down the streets at night and potentially leading to a local artist's suicide. The village is disturbed, but little evidence of the woman’s presence is presented and the village moves on.

About this time, New York is looking for an additional source of fresh water and plans are made to build a dam and flood the valley. Cornelius becomes a leading figure in the plan’s opposition, fighting it at every turn, even as he approaches a century old. Eventually, however, he dies, and with him the opposition to the dam. In the aftermath, Cornelius estate passes to the man in black rather than the previously expected nephew, and soon after, people begin to hear and see strange things coming from his old house.

Onto the stage steps young Lottie Schmidt, who is the chief archivist of this tale. Her father, Riener, is a disgraced professor from Germany who has made his new profession stonemasonry. They immigrated to the US and then began working on the dam project. One day, a Hungarian woman who worked with Lottie in the camp kitchens, Helen, intentionally steps in front of a mule train and is trampled. Her husband was cheating on her behind her back. If she’d hoped for a quick death, she was disappointed. Her limbs are broken, as is her spine, but she clings to life for another few days. Her husband, heartbroken and regretful, reaches out to the Man in Black, who brings her back from the dead a week later, though her body remains broken and twisted.

Riener and another stonemason, fearing witchcraft, take Helen’s children and hide them. Helen, though, decides to take them by force. She fails in large part due to her broken body, and returns home. Shaken, Riener and the other stonemason decide to kill Helen again. Before anything can be done, Helen’s husband, George, has a seizure. Throughout the event, he babbles in several languages, languages he couldn’t possibly have known, about “Black Water” before dying. As he dies, he vomits black brackish water from his every pore and orifice, along with tadpoles unlike anything anyone had seen before. When the undertaker’s apprentice attempts to pick up the body, he meets Helen instead, and loses his mind before killing his boss and then his fiancé before committing suicide (presumably they were having an affair).

The same day Helen attempts to retrieve her children, and again is foiled. Not to be deterred, she goes looking for Lottie, finding her at the local bakery where she works. Helen speaks to her in the language of the dead, and Lottie sees the world as it truly is, as an ocean of black water. She sees herself, her worst self, and also the worst selves of the people around her. And in the water, something massive, with spines running along its back. A Leviathan. An Ouroboros. A Jormungandr. “He waits girl. He will always be waiting for you.” Lottie struggles against Helen, rousing a crowd who rescues her from the dead woman. When she gets home though, she collapses into bed, sick with fever.

Riener says she has been poisoned. An illness of the soul caused by the vision Helen gave her. He has a history with sorcery. Knows its effects. He has books, and now he devours them with a vengeance, looking for something that can save his daughter. When he emerges, something in him has changed. He traps Helen in her old home with magic. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s the best he can do at the moment. After she’s weakened a bit, he can question her, find out who made her, and if they are a dabbler, or a true black magician. After a few hours, Riener approaches the home with a few other immigrants, intent on questioning the thing that was Helen. When asked who her master is, she responds that it’s “The Fisherman” and “His name isn’t for the likes of you.” Finally, she gives the real name: Apep. Riener asks how much of his work is left. “He has set the near lines,” she says before Riener dismisses her. Her house is left to burn while the men go to deal with her master.

Reiner describes what little he knows of The Fisherman, who was once an apprentice of Kurath, a scholar of magic. He’s referred to as “The Fisherman” because he wishes to catch Leviathan, who swam in the waters before the earth was formed. On the way, they run into strange creatures and a wall of water. Reiner is able to dismiss the creatures, but cannot dismiss the wall of water. The group proceeds to the Dort house where Cornelius and his wife once lived. Riener says that the walls of water are from the Dark Ocean and that it’s “leaking through.” Inside the house, they find a small forest of pine trees, and they travel through it to find a ravine and a stream. One of the men realizes they were never inside the house at all. In a panic, one man bolts, and the rest follow. They find an ocean, a dark parody of the one they all crossed to reach New York. Something huge emerges from water, then disappears beneath surface. The beach they’ve found is covered in the blood of cattle the size of elephants, each one bait on a massive hook. On that shore, they find the Fisherman and his lines. The group rushes forward to cut the lines while Riener attempts to distract the Fisherman but the Fisherman kills one man anyway, turning him into the same thing Helen was.

Already, Leviathan is in the Fisherman’s net. The lines have caught him. And the group struggles to cut the lines, fight the undead man, and defend themselves from the Fisherman. Eventually, they cut one of the lines, and the ropes lunge towards Reiner and the Fisherman. Riener dodges, but the Fisherman doesn’t. He’s tied up and turned into bait by the very spells he engraved into the rope. The undead man dies once more, killed by another rope and hook. The Fisherman is dragged into the dark ocean, cursing and screaming all the way. Exhausted, the party carefully cuts the nearby ropes. Some attempt to bury their dead comrade, but Reiner tells them to ignore him. The fisherman isn’t dead, but bound by his own lines. They need to leave before his power returns. As they leave, Leviathan seems to begin breaking free of the remaining ropes.

The next year, when men go to remove Cornelius’ guest from the Dort house, they find it in ruins, though they find the hand of... Something. In a fit of caution, the sheriff burns the house down. Shortly afterwards, a strange gem the size of a man’s head is found in the roots of an apple tree inside the Dort Orchard. It promptly goes missing under mysterious circumstances. In the years afterwards, the group disbands as the reservoir approaches completion and their jobs become redundant. Reiner is the last to leave, getting a job with the water authority as WWI breaks out. It’s around this time the Dutchman’s creek comes about, and the rumors begin. Before his retirement, Reiner looks into it, and what he finds disturbs him enough to recruit Lottie’s husband Jacob, a member of the original party, to help him get to the bottom of it.

The creek is the primary source of strange happenings in the region, and Reiner and Jacob’s experience with it is no less strange. Riener is so overcome that he tells Jacob how he came to the stated. In the old country, he was a friendly rival of another professor named Wilhelm. Together, they worked to translate a couple of books that supposedly contained prehistoric languages. In truth, they had stumbled upon books of ancient magic. Curiosity in hand, they made their inquiries and began their experiments. It wasn’t long before they were inducted into a kind of magical society and were accepted as apprentices of a sort.

Together they advanced quickly, overcoming a number of challenges great and small before being given a task and chance to prove themselves. They were to infiltrate a hostile city, retrieve a flower on the far side, and return. But Wilhelm wasn’t as prepared as he thought he was: the flower was cursed. Rainer knew, but when he tried to pluck the flower correctly, Wilhelm laughed at him. So, he let Wilhelm pluck the flower and Wilhelm paid the price for it. Questions were asked. Reiner was investigated. Enough was uncovered for the college to expel him, but the truth remained hidden.

Now Wilhelm calls out to Reiner, there along Dutchman’s Creek. Blaming him for his death. Instead of continuing, Reiner leaves a mark meant to confuse those seeking to go upriver, and they return to the car.

In the present day, Abe and Dan lean back in their chairs as Howard concludes his story. Abe asks Dan if he’s sure about fishing in Dutchman’s creek, but of course, he is. They continue, and Abe relates some of the other haunting stories he’s heard about the reservoir. He’s sure the story didn’t include certain things, and he asks Dan exactly how he found out about Dutchman’s Creek. Dan says the book showed him, and after gathering his things, storms off. Abe follows, letting Dan get settled into a fishing spot before casting his own line. Shortly after, he hooks a fish and begins pulling it in.

Dan, curious about what he’s caught, comes over the help and they drag it to shore. What they land isn’t a fish. Instead, it resembles a fish with a human skull. Shaken, Dan admits he learned about Dutchman’s Creek through his grandfather’s fishing journal, and how his grandfather wrote that he’d seen his dead wife there. Dan suspected he could find his wife, too. After the admittance, he moves further upstream.

Abe wants nothing to do with this, but unwilling to leave his friend behind, follows. Soon after, he finds his wife, or something pretending to be his wife. Initially, their greeting is amorous, but Abe eventually sees through the disguise and to fish-person beneath. Marie, as the fish-thing still calls herself, offers to lead Abe to where Dan is. It’s clear shortly into the journey that they aren’t in Kansas anymore. They go through trees that are razor sharp, and find a pilgrim along the road who speaks in an unfamiliar language before Marie scares him off. They walk past the corpses of giant oxen which she declares are “Oxen of the Sun” taken by Apep. Finally, they move on to a beach. There they find Dan. And, The Fisherman.

Dan is surrounded by his family, or at least of their mimics, and the state of his beard reveals he’s been here for quite a while. The Fisherman is the same pilgrim Abe met on the road, now aged and weathered. Time works differently here than we might expect. Howard’s story was true. A few details were off maybe, maybe. But on the whole? It’s all there.

Ropes are tied to the beach at specific points, grasped by pale hands and dragging in the Leviathan. Dan’s trip was a lot shorter than Abe’s. Truncated. His stay has been longer, though. Three days. Maybe more. During that time, Dan has talked with The Fisherman. Apparently, the men from the camp arrived just as he was about to haul in his catch. Apophis. The Leviathan. Apep. It has several names. Dan wants to help rather than go back home. He wants his family back. Abe could help too. Abe refuses. Dan begs, saying that he might lose them again. But Abe can’t do it. He gazes at The Fisherman and realizes the truth: The Fisherman is something much larger, much deeper than the man on the beach. He’s punched through not just one dimension, but several, gaining the power he needs to drag in the Leviathan.

Abe tries to leave, but Dan says that The Fisherman needs their strength and attempts to kill him. Abe trips Dan up, but Dan’s family gets involved, and he has to back off. Dan goes in again, and this time, Abe cuts him with a scaling knife. Dan’s children stop their movement towards Abe and instead focus on the now injured Dan. They devour him while Abe flees.

Some teenagers find Abe in the woods shortly after. Dan is declared missing, and Abe is under suspicion for his murder. Though eventually the police grow tired of the search. After a long period in the hospital, Abe is offered a buyout from his company, which he regretfully takes. He tries fishing a couple of times, but can’t bring himself to actually do the thing. Instead, he just drifts, struggling to find meaning in a life post Dan, post Marie, and post fishing. Time passes, and neighbors drift in and out. Eventually a family moves in to the house next door. The family’s daughter expresses an interest in fishing, and after a few conversations, Abe is able to get over his fear of fishing and is able to return to the sport.

Not long after, in the early 2000s, the area floods to an unusual level and a hurricane drives through New York. Soon after the initial wave of flooding, Abe’s power goes out, and he’s forced to switch to propane to cook. While cooking, Dan shows up, lingering in the doorway like a malevolent shadow. He’s one of them now, with golden eyes. He’s here to talk, or at least that’s what he says. Abe tells him to leave. He knows what’s up. Dan refuses, and Abe shoots Canola oil through a candle, a tiny flamethrower, but it’s enough to chase Dan off. Abe follows him out onto the floodplain before looking into the water. Inside the seething waves, he sees Marie, his wife, and two children with “my mother’s nose.”

Thematic Analysis

Before I can discuss the book’s themes in detail, I need to provide some background context. I read this book on my honeymoon and fell in love with it, which is a little... Ironic? Serendipitous? Both maybe. For several reasons, not the least of which being that I was greatly enjoying a book about a man who just lost his wife, while celebrating my marriage. But I digress.

My wife and I were on our honeymoon in what was supposed to be a two-week tour through Scotland and Ireland. But, a week in, we had to cut the trip short. Scotland had been everything we’d dreamed of, but we were really looking forward to the Ireland part of the trip. We had just crossed the channel into Belfast when we got a call that one of our friends had gone to the hospital. We thought it wasn’t a big deal. He was in good health and had just been hiking in Washington State with his wife. The condition wasn’t likely to be serious. Unfortunately, we and everyone else, were horribly, lethally wrong.

The next morning, our tour group was scheduled to visit a few places ending in the Titanic Museum. It was an experience. The museum featured displays covering everything from the initial shipyard construction to the discovery of the Titanic’s wreckage. If you've never been, the museum has a way of emphasizing the lack of caution the owners and crew had. The waste of life that resulted. That too seems ironic, looking back. We got another call on our way out.

Our friend, we’ll call him Tom, had gone to the hospital with a cardiac arrhythmia the night before. A serious diagnosis, but not usually life threatening. Instead of doing their due diligence and running a full battery of cardiac tests though, the hospital discharged him. Tom went home and the next day, on his way to pick up his new prescription, collapsed in the grocery store. His wife was with him. She, at the time was six months pregnant with their first child, and she performed CPR on her husband for ten minutes, until EMTs arrived. It wasn’t enough. Tom was dead by the time he reached the hospital.

I wasn’t grieving. Not in the same way Amy and my wife were. Tom and I shared a lot of hobbies, loved a lot of the same authors, enjoyed the same things. I was anticipating, to borrow a Langan phrase, “The Bromance of the Century.” But I had only met Tom a handful of times, talked to him for a few hours. I didn’t know him. They had known him for years. It was like watching people fall apart in slow motion, and over the coming weeks, I couldn’t help but cast my mind back to The Fisherman. Not because the book is about grief, but because of how it is about grief.

The Fisherman is a story about watching people fall apart. First, we see Abe fall apart. Then we see him put himself back together. Then we see Dan fall apart, and the cracks that are left when he’s piecing things back together. Then we see Riener through Lottie’s eyes, as he deals with the loss of his friend and rival.

Most people will encounter grief in their lives. It’s one of the most common experiences to humans. We’ve all lost people close to us, and it’s inevitable that if we don’t die first, we’ll lose more. That loss, be it due to death, or time, or just drifting apart, can warp a person. Mutating their character in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Like the black ocean of The Fisherman, it can drown you, bury you under the weight of your pain, and like water, that pain can cling to your skin even when you leave the pool. It can follow you out into the wider world, and for longer than you might expect. Grief haunts us more thoroughly than any ghost.

I think that explains part of why The Fisherman is so effective. It isn’t cosmic horror. Sure, it has the trappings of the genre, Apep is a classic Cthulhuesque figure, strange fish-men and stranger magics are sprinkled liberally throughout the story. But when it comes down to it, Abe isn’t haunted by fish-men, or Apep. He isn’t shaken by the magic that he’s seen. He’s haunted by what those things invoke. Dan haunts Abe, not because a fish-man wears his face, but because by that point in the story, Dan represents the loss of a friendship, and Abe feels responsible for failing to guide the man away from his grief. Marie haunts Abe because of the coupling he had with the fish-thing that stole her identity has tainted his memories of their relationship. Riener is haunted by Wilhem because Riener could have saved him with a word. The fish-men are only the mechanism by which these hauntings manifest themselves.

By the second or third chapter, Abe had made his peace with Marie’s death. He’d had time to acknowledge the hurt, the pain, and he’d moved on. Not completely, but sufficiently to discern reality from delusion. Dan couldn’t escape his grief. He’d lost too much, too quickly. He drowned himself in that black ocean, in grief, and eventually Abe was forced to choose whether to drown with him, or to let go.

By letting go, by saving himself, Abe has opened himself up to being haunted by Dan, but this haunting isn’t as effective as Marie’s. Because Abe recognizes that, to some extent, Dan made his own decisions. Marie though? That was all Abe. That coupling ripped open old scars, and let loose a river of blood.

Sometimes, grief is like that. It sneaks up on you, devouring you whole for a moment, even long after you “get over” the loss of the relationship. Sometimes that moving on can feel like a betrayal.

Criticism

Of all the criticism’s I’ve seen levied towards The Fisherman, the only one I can agree with is that the pacing is a little rough. Earlier I said The Fisherman felt “crafted,” and I meant that even the pacing feels intentional. But I don’t know that I agree with that intention where pacing is concerned. Each section of the book has a very different pacing style, and it results in a couple of points that feel like whiplash. The initial section is glacially paced, with a lot of time spent on background details and wallowing in Abe and Dan’s respective grief. The second section is spent on Lottie and Reiner, which manages to drift between glacial pacing of the earlier sections and an overview style of writing that feels almost too fast. Finally, the last section returns to Abe and Dan and is mostly fast paced, with the last chapter returning to the slower, more methodical pacing of earlier sections. This inconsistent pacing can be exhausting to read, and I think can leave readers a little unbalanced. Again, I think that this is somewhat intentional, but I’d still have preferred a slightly more consistent “macro” pacing. But I also don’t have any suggestions to actually fix it while maintaining the story’s integrity.

Overall, I think this is one of the best books I’ve ever read. While The Fisherman won the Bram Stoker award, I think it’s more comparable to Shirley Jackson’s writing. This isn’t an epistolary tale lamenting the rise of immigration, instead it’s a more personal tale of haunting and horror. There’s a lot to it, and a lot I didn’t go into that I probably could have. If you are wondering if this is worth a read, I can wholeheartedly recommend it. The Fisherman is a masterpiece, and if you can suffer through a few pacing issues, I think you will enjoy it as much as I did.

Plot Esoterica

I’d like to briefly mention a few interesting plot details that may not apply to the thematic analysis. The first one is that this story is only one of several in the larger Langan Mythos. For more in that mythos, I highly recommend Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies (my review of which is linked below). While the themes are different, the imagery in those stories remains similar, and there are several pieces of lore that are shared between those stories and The Fisherman.

Second, I think it’s interesting that the fish-men claim to serve Apep, but also serve the titular Fisherman. This, I think, is where the cosmic horror elements really come into play, because it’s clear the fish-men put this whole thing into play by putting the Fisherman on the path to hooking Apep. I don’t know if that means that Apep wants to be caught, or if the fish-men are a cult that believe they serve Apep, while actually just serving their own interests. Either way, it’s interesting to consider. I think it’s also interesting that the Fisherman is enough of a magician to recognize the importance of what he is doing, and presumably is aware of what the fish-men are but is still willing to go along with their string pulling. I’m not sure whether to chalk this up to willful ignorance, zealotry, or pardon the pun, something fishy going on.