The Fisherman

Langan’s dark novel is heavily influenced by many famous names in the horror genre and beyond, from Herman Melville and H.P. Lovecraft to the American poet and horror author Edgar Allan Poe. In “The Raven” (1835), Poe once envisioned the raven as a metaphor for grief, depicting it as a black bird that perches “never flitting” on a bust of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and the intellect. Most distressing to the poem’s narrator is grief’s utter numbness and unresponsiveness, for it has but one answer to each and every question or reminiscence: “Nevermore.” Poe’s hero resorts to a series of wide-ranging queries scavenged from mythology and scripture, but none draws the slightest echo or spark from the black well of the bird’s nihilistic torpor, and the poem as a whole suggests that all the world’s knowledge and lore is barren and powerless in the face of death, which eclipses the bright goddess of wisdom herself. In many ways, the imagery in Poe’s famous poem provide guidelines for analyzing the actions of the bereaved male characters in The Fisherman, for they, like the unnamed speaker in “The Raven,” stare into the stark face of death and demand answers of that eternal mystery: answers that never truly appear.

For the three widowers of The Fisherman (Dan, Abe, and the Fisherman himself), their grief therefore drops like a black curtain over the mind, numbing and warping the intellect. For six weeks after the death of his wife and family, Dan is too despondent to return to his job at IBM; likewise, in the wake of Marie’s death, Abe is out for a full three months. As therapy, the two of them set out fishing together, but their ill-fated trip to Dutchman’s Creek reveals just how radically different their responses to grief and loss have become. Before the trip, the more passive, fatalistic Abe has a revelatory nightmare: Marie, skewered on his fishhook and hideously transfigured, tells him, “What’s lost is lost,” (33), thematically echoing the “Nevermore” of Poe’s dour raven, and it can be inferred that Abe at least has the wisdom to accept that the dead can never return.

By contrast, when Dan realizes that the preternatural Dutchman’s Creek has the power to restore the dead to a macabre half-life, he takes quite a different approach to his grief, essentially entering into a dark pact with the deadly Fisherman and agreeing to sacrifice his friend for the sake of an illusion: the hideous doppelgängers who impersonate his lost family. In the end, Dan succumbs to the Fisherman’s dark lure, eager to sacrifice his friend’s life, as well as everything he possesses, in order to “retrieve” his family from the dead. Of the two men, Abe’s mind is the less clouded, for he eventually sees through “Marie’s” similar deception and manages to fend off the younger man’s homicidal attack before Dan succumbs to the dark embrace of the beings he has so eagerly and misguidedly sought.

However, the Fisherman is by his very nature the most deluded of the three widowers, and he has been deeply plagued and corrupted by mingled grief and guilt for centuries. In a vain attempt to atone for and undo his slaughter of his own family, he gives himself over entirely to Poe’s tomes of “forgotten lore.” For centuries, by way of a cornucopia of rites and mythologies, he has labored to move heaven and earth in a constant battle to defy death itself and restore his family to life. However, although his rituals have prolonged his own life, the novel offers no evidence that the dead can actually be resurrected as they once were. The Fisherman may be surrounded by vicious, fanged doppelgängers of the long-lost dead, but his murderous delusions are a reminder that superstition itself is canonically rooted in grief and loss. As both the Fisherman and Dan exemplify, much of the horror of grief and guilt lies in the perversion of humanity’s most essential qualities: empathy and reason.