The Fisherman

As one of the novel’s “Ahab” figures, Dan has suffered a traumatic loss with the deaths of his wife and children in a car accident. Unlike Ahab, Dan’s “great white beast” (18) is not a whale but a speeding truck, and his scars, if anything, run deeper than Ahab’s. Tall, thin, red-haired, and 20 years younger than his coworker Abe, Dan once smiled often, but now, his fissured face hints at his ongoing struggle with The Quiet Horror of Grief. Unlike Abe’s loss of Marie, the death of Dan’s family was not a gradual leave-taking cushioned by farewells but a sudden “thunderbolt” of a catastrophe. Worse, it flowed from his own error: a hasty left turn into the path of a speeding truck. Compulsively, Dan makes frequent pilgrimages to the intersection where his family was incinerated, “the place where [he] was cast out” of heaven and into “Hell” (28). Like Abe’s fishing trips, the predictable rhythms of the traffic light give him an odd sense of calm: of imperious order at a juncture of life-shattering randomness. Although Dan is outwardly calm in public,  his haggard appearance suggests that his grief will take a much more ruthless form than that of the mild-mannered Abe.

In the throes of despair, Dan finds a reference to “Dutchman’s Creek” in his grandfather’s fishing journal, along with the words, “Saw Eva” (the name of Dan’s long-dead grandmother). Grasping at this promise of resurrection, Dan grows determined to experience this supernatural phenomenon for himself. At the café near Dutchman’s Creek, Dan extracts from Howard’s gruesome tale only what he wants to hear: a miraculous story of a death-defying magician who found “the means” to bring his dead family back to life. Dan’s desperation to reclaim his family is so intense that, with Ahab-esque tunnel-vision, he refuses to acknowledge the demonic, protean nature of the beings he finds at Dutchman’s Creek. Also like Ahab, who led his own crew to destruction, Dan seeks to sacrifice Abe to his quixotic cause by attempting to feed his friend’s life and “strength” to the Fisherman so that the deadly figure will not “take away” his family. When Dan fails to execute this plan, it is he it is whom his feral “family” devours, spurring Abe to deliver his bleak epitaph: that Dan “had been willing to sacrifice the reality of friendship, however mundane, in favor of [a] lie” (251). As with the bold but deluded Captain Ahab, Dan’s own obsessions consume him in the end.

Rainer’s story is set much earlier than the events experienced by Abe and Dan in the novel’s primary timeline. As the courageous hero of The Fisherman’s lengthy story-within-a-story (which the café owner, Howard, tells to Abe and Dan), Rainer Schmidt serves as a foil for the two less-heroic protagonists of the present-day story arc. A German professor of languages who immigrated to the United States after a career-ending scandal, Rainer uses his knowledge of the occult to fight the Fisherman’s sinister machinations in New York’s Esopus River Valley. When a woman who was mangled in a street accident seemingly comes back to life, Rainer responds to his neighbors’ desperate request that he use his arcane knowledge to return the violent, demonic woman to the grave. After consulting a “tall, narrow” book that radiates pure blackness, Rainer magically ends the menace of the dead woman. Then, with a few companions, he tracks the evil to its source, Dort House, which has become a diabolical portal for the otherworldly “dark sea” that runs under the surface of the earth. On the shores to this sea, Rainer courageously cuts away many of the ropes that the preternatural Fisherman uses to tether the whale-like Leviathan. In the process, Rainer traps the Fisherman by “using his own tools” (162) against him.

Ironically, Rainer has a reputation as the “resident skeptic” of his family; he is a rationalist devoted to “clear thinking” and resists embracing religious or superstitious dogma. In Europe, he was famous for his brilliant, free-thinking essays and became a full professor at the age of 29. He rose quickly in his profession, becoming fluent in many languages, but eventually, he tried to extend his vast knowledge to prehistoric languages, the “tongues that lay before the beginning” (183), and these became the dark seeds of his undoing. With a colleague named Wilhelm Vanderwort, he pried into the secrets of a forbidden book laden with hermetic words that were “woven into” existence itself. This discovery led them to a secret cabal of linguists who knew of shadow cities hidden beneath their own. Fatefully, on a voyage into one of these subterranean worlds, Wilhelm curtly dismissed Rainer’s warnings about how best to proceed, and because Rainer viewed Wilhelm as more rival than friend, he decided not to press the issue. As a result, Wilhelm died horribly and publicly, during a university lecture. The resulting scandal, with its reek of brimstone, blackened Rainer’s name, casting him out of European society forever.

Rainer relocated to America with his wife and three young daughters, setting his books aside for a time to work the cash register at his sister-in-law’s bakery in the Bronx. In 1907, when work on the great Ashokan Reservoir began, Rainer moved his family to the Catskills, using his gift for persuasion to lie his way into a coveted job as a stone mason. For years, however, he continued to treasure his occult scholarship as a “kingdom where he still reign[ed]” (111). Wistfully, he always dreamed of giving up manual labor and returning to work as a professor, hopefully at an American university, but this dream is never realized.

By the time of his encounter with the Fisherman at Dort House, Rainer’s hair is thinning and his face is heavily lined from the cares and frustrations of his thwarted life. Moreover, as he confides to his son-in-law Jacob on their trip to Dutchman’s Creek, he still harbors guilt over having allowed Wilhelm to doom himself by violating the cabal’s magic rituals. This youthful betrayal, which was rooted in rivalry and pride, haunts Rainer all his life until an aggressive form of Alzheimer’s steals his vast, dangerous knowledge.

Lottie, Rainer Schmidt’s teenage daughter, is one of the novel’s secondary characters and the principal witness of the uncanny events that beset her father’s work camp in the Esopus Valley. As it happened, a Lutheran minister named Mapple interviewed her toward the end of her life, and her recollections form the core of the story that Howard shares with Abe and Dan in the present-day storyline.

After her family’s move from Germany to America, Lottie was put to work at her aunt’s bakery in the Bronx; during this time, her relationship with her mother, Clara, deteriorated due to Clara’s tension over having to work under her domineering sister (Lottie’s aunt). Later, at the Esopus camp bakery, her mother finally relaxed in the absence of her sister, showing a warm and ribald sense of humor, and Lottie once again exulted in her company.

Unfortunately, it is here in the bakery that Lotte has the supernatural ordeal that drives this story-within-a-story to its climax. Helen, the mangled woman who was raised from the dead by the Fisherman’s magic, corners Lottie in the pantry and closes the door. Her presence plunges Lottie into a waking nightmare: an apocalyptic vision of a dark sea teeming with floating, murmuring bodies, one of which is herself. In this dark, primordial soup—like a collective id—the pale bodies of her siblings and parents bob like driftwood along with millions of others, all of them disgorging “monologues of rage, pain, and frustration” (105). Lottie’s own doppelgänger gasps out the darkest, most prurient desires: lurid fantasies of having sex with older men, including Lottie’s father, as well as the urge to visit deadly violence against her younger sisters. As the hideous but true words swarm over Lottie like ants, she fights back furiously, punching and kicking at “Helen.” Looming over them both is a ravenous beast, impossibly vast, with a cavernous, devouring maw.

Though Lottie emerges physically unharmed, mentally she is never quite the same; her “soul,” Rainer says, is “very sick.” Her doppelganger’s lewd reveries and sadistic fantasies sear her with the same intensity of guilt that she would have had if she had actually committed these deeds. In most respects, she has always been a typical teenager, with ordinary grudges and lusts, but her glimpse behind the “mask” (the world’s rational façade—the same one that Dan Drescher speaks of “punching through”) threatens Lottie’s sanity with its hideous truths. Finally, to release Lottie from her feverish misery, Rainer’s wife, Clara, demands that Rainer use his arcane learning to rid the camp of Helen and her evil influence.

Over her long life, Lottie demonstrates a probing curiosity that she may have inherited from her father, as well as a sense of tolerance that may come from her terrible vision in the pantry. Her final acceptance of her own weaknesses, losses, and dark urges, as well as her ability to put them behind her, distinguish her from the novel’s Ahab figures (i.e., the Fisherman and Dan), as their stubborn refusal to accept death and loss dooms them to a barrage of deadly supernatural experiences, and in Dan’s case, claims his very life.