The Fisherman

There are definitely some positives to take from this book. I thought that the first act of the book, which introduces us to our protagonists Abe and Dan, was quite strong. I enjoyed Langan’s prose in this section: Abe has a strong inner voice and you get a good sense of the sort of person he is, and there’s a sense of foreboding that builds as he and Dan make their way down to Dutchman’s Creek.

However, I think where The Fisherman fails is that it becomes bogged down by a huge amount of exposition and backstory which removes a lot of the mystery around the main “villain” of the book. By the time I made it back to Abe and Dan, I felt that I wasn’t invested in them the way I initially was.

A common adage in writing is “show, don’t tell”; at times it seems as if Langan set out to do precisely the opposite, by including a flashback that makes up over half of the book. For a story which is categorised as cosmic horror, you would think that Langan would benefit from leaving some things unexplained, but he seemed not to trust his own writing enough to do so. In the second act, his prose largely follows the form of “something happened, which made this person feel some way, and then something else happened”. It’s bland and it ruined a lot of the initial optimism I had for the book after reading through the first act.

I resisted the urge to skip through this section and tried to give it a fair shot. By the time I finished the book, I wasn’t convinced that was worth it. There was a scene towards the end of the book that I genuinely found shocking to read, but even that couldn’t convince me to care about Abe or Dan’s fate. It’s a shame, as there is definitely a version of Abe and Dan’s tale that I would have enjoyed reading. Sadly, The Fisherman spends so much of its time explaining that mystery that, by the time it returns to the story that initially drew me in, much of that mystery, and indeed much of my interest, had already gone.