The Fisherman

Though much of The Fisherman follows the tenets of realism in its characterizations and detailed verisimilitude, other aspects embody a darker, more fantastical vision. In these sequences, which subvert the setting’s façade of normalcy, Langan draws copiously from the tropes and imagery of “cosmic horror,” a subgenre of horror fiction. In 1927, the author H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) codified this cul-de-sac of terror in his classic essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (edited by E.F. Bleiler, Dover Publications, 1973), drawing a stark line between genre stories that seek only to shock and truly “weird” tales that are designed to unsettle the reader’s faith in a stable, rational universe. In this discussion, Lovecraft suggests that conventional fright stories of “secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains” merely reinforce the formal sense of order, whereas the “true weird tale” conjures a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces.”

In addition to tracing the so-called “weird” tale’s evolution through the 19th and early 20th centuries, Lovecraft offers thumbnail sketches of pioneers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Robert W. Chambers, and Algernon Blackwood. Likewise, Langan’s novel pays homage to these past masters, as several characters in The Fisherman constitute subtle homages to their work. For example, Howard, the “lantern-jawed” café owner who recounts the story of Rainer and the Fisherman, is an obvious stand-in for H.P. (Howard Phillips) Lovecraft himself. In this context, Howard’s nagging sense that he was “supposed to tell” (45) this specific tale to these two men is yet another sly allusion. Similarly, Howard’s fatalistic “unburdening” links him to the sage-like narrator of Coleridge’s classic poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798),which is a saga of maritime cosmic horror that inspired Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Langan’s primary literary model. Further literary allusions can be found in the fact that Langan’s Howard works at Herman’s Café.

Notably, Hawthorne also makes a cameo in Howard’s tale in Lottie Schmidt’s dream of her father with a “black emptiness” where his face should be. This scene is an allusion to the inexplicable horror described in Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836). At the same time, the forbidden “dark volume” that blackens Rainer’s face shares an occult lineage with both Lovecraft’s Necronomicon and the eponymous book of Robert W. Chambers’s (1865-1933) The King in Yellow (1895), a fictional tome that invokes a vision of a black-starred universe riven by incomprehensible forces. On a similar note, the “white demons” floating in The Fisherman’s “black ocean” recall the Welsh writer Arthur Machen’s (1863-1947) “The White People,” a story of cosmic horror, as well as Machen’s other tales (e.g., “The Red Hand” and “The Novel of the Black Seal”), which feature subterranean realms teeming with ancient, troglodytic horrors.

The haunted Catskill landscapes of The Fisherman also tap into the macabre power of earlier weird fiction, hinting at the existence of a godless malignancy at the heart of nature itself. Lovecraft famously opined that American “weird” writing is steeped in a dark vision of the natural world, perhaps originating from distant memories of the “vast and gloomy virgin forests in whose perpetual twilight all terrors might well lurk” (Lovecraft, H.P. “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” Edited by E.F. Bleiler, Dover Publications, 1973). Edgar Allan Poe, whose stygian landscapes often exude a sense of sentient, feral watchfulness, ends his own maritime novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), in a remote realm of inexplicable whiteness that is guarded by a vast, unfathomable being similar to Langan’s Leviathan or Lovecraft’s monstrous Cthulhu.

Set in the dense forests and meandering streams of New York’s scenic Hudson River Valley, The Fisherman casts a bleak vision of nature at its most unnatural: forbidden realms, cursed knowledge, and vast, incomprehensible entities haunting the rim of the rational world. Lovecraft’s own horror fiction so intensely exemplified this nameless dread that devotees of his work often use the term “Lovecraftian horror” interchangeably with “cosmic horror” to describe this subgenre. Cthulhu, the “Great Old One” of Lovecraft’s mythos, echoes through the weird fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries and emerges from the black surface of The Fisherman as the “Great Power” known as the Leviathan: a colossus of ancient and unfathomable mystery. In Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” (1928), the “mountainous monstrosity” that is Cthulhu “cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.” Other stories, however, suggest an immense aquatic beast, tentacled like an octopus, with webbed arms and legs, scythe-like claws, and vestigial wings. As for the Leviathan, Langan describes it vaguely as vast, limbless, and colorless—a non-Euclidian nightmare of amorphous, mind-shattering chaos devoid of earthly contexts or contours, and this fleshy, godless maelstrom lies at the very heart of The Fisherman’s irrational dreamscape.