I like cosmic horror so on a recommendation I’m reading The Fisherman, by John Langan. It’s set in upstate NY near the Ashokan reservoir, where I’ve spent some time in a previous life, and it’s been well received so I thought I’d try it. It’s about an older man who befriends a younger guy at work (IBM) because they’re both recent widowers, and they bond through a shared love of freshwater fishing. They fish the various creeks and streams in the Kingston/poughkeepsie area but have an horrific, Cthulhu-esque experience.
The book turned into an incredible slog for me.
It’s genre fiction, so is full of cringey homespun folksy writing. Every other sentence contains a metaphor, and Langan doesn’t seem to know how to convey thoughts and emotions without drubbing you over the head. For instance, at one point his narrator (the older widower) says “if this were a movie, this would be the part where something happens and the ominous music plays.” Gee, thanks John. I love being treated like I’m ten years old.
Langan is the kind of author who writes things like “He cut right through it, like a hot knife through soft butter.”
But I could hold my nose and swallow all that, if he didn’t completely derail his story after the first this has been told. The horrific encounter the two guys endure ultimately derives from the Esopus area, which was later flooded and turned into the Ashokan reservoir. Now, that’s an interesting idea for horror — areas that used to contain villages but later get flooded are always a bit creepy — but he dwells on this, not for thirty sentences, or thirty pages, but seemingly for THIRTY YEARS.
It’s excruciating. The flashback goes on for chapter after chapter after chapter. What we get of these late nineteenth century people is that a collection of trite stereotypes about immigrants with old timey names like “Lottie.”
The flashback is supposedly an account of the reservoirs dark history, told to our two protagonists at a diner by an old cook as a warning about fishing in a certain area. But we get ENDLESS and intricate descriptions of every single thing the characters are saying and doing — things the old cook at the diner could not possibly know because he wasn’t there. And even if he were, we don’t care.
I’m going to keep reading it because I’m a completist. But I’m into over a hundred pages of the flashback and I feel like it will never end.