The Fisherman

The Fisherman is a horror novel by the American writer John Langan, published in 2016. It won the Bram Stoker Award for best novel, and a great deal of its length is given over to a second story told inside the first.

Abe and Dan are two widowers in upstate New York whose friendship rests on the fishing trips they take together. Both are still grieving, and those trips are the thread that holds each of them together, especially Dan, who is the more badly broken by his loss.

They hear about Dutchman's Creek, which runs out of the Ashokan Reservoir, and about the claim that has grown up around it, that people who fish there can be given back what they have lost. The creek and reservoir sit on ground that was flooded when the valley was dammed in the early twentieth century, and the novel treats that drowned landscape as part of what draws the two men on. They dismiss the story as a tall tale, and then circumstances push them up the water anyway.

What waits for them opens onto the memoir of another man who fished the same creek decades earlier and onto the long history of a figure known as Der Fisher, the Fisherman. The book is built as a frame around that inner account, so the reader hears the older tale almost in full before the two threads meet.