What do you lose when someone close to you dies? Not just someone you love but also, maybe, someone you hate or envy? Maybe the part of us that lived, felt, and was that earlier way goes too. And that soup of loss and longing is not always resting in peace. So when you want to bring back the dead, or you reach out to a spirit from the beyond, it is not just them that you are beckoning. Maybe you want to retrieve a part of your existence that was bookmarked by that person as well.
The premise of The Fisherman is a dramatic, literary horror story. It explores the usual tropes of the genre – what types of evil lurk, what choices do we really have, what all would we trade to bring back whom we lost…and whom do we become in the process.
The story takes us through the lives of two men who, at different times, have lost their wives and children. (At least one of them has.) They work together in the same office. We first follow Abraham or Abe (pay attention to the name here). He lost his wife soon after finding love in life. He initially turned to alcoholism. (The description of the molasse of grief that one wades through after the death of someone) is lyrical and exacting.) Over time, Abe finds solace in fishing. Then one day, a colleague at work, Dan, also faces a similar fate. He loses his wife and kid(s?) in an accident that he himself survives. So, there is loss, shame, guilt…and the dimming of life.
Abe recognizes this in Dan and suggests that they go fishing together.
They keep looking for spots to fish around in and come across a place called ‘The Dutchman’s Creek’ in upstate New York. It is not very far from where they live. However, the place comes mired in lore and warning. On their way up the Creek, they stop at a diner, and they hear about an immigrant who moved into the area and did something akin to energetic colonization of the space. (Cannot reveal too much here without it being a giveaway.)
But these are places where the book really heightens from a page-turner plot to a soak in the philosophy. The narrative is a story within a story. The owner at the diner talks about characters and their lives. And through that lens, we find out more about those characters and their inner worlds. Then we begin the build-up to the darkness that leads the two men to the Creek.
The description of the creek itself, its history, the sickness of suppressed wounds and unyelled screams is palpable. It does get a bit long-winded sometime but what really shines through is the way some Biblical motifs and stories are leveraged here – especially the immenseness of Leviathan. Not just the actual monstrous creature – but what Leviathan symbolized. Was Leviathan any more or less dangerous than Lucifer? What sustains a creature like that? Are we sure that it does not exist in the same plane as us?
Then we come to the titular character itself, “The Fisherman”. He was a dark, lean stranger dressed in an ominous air of mystery comes to the area. He takes over a house, and no one ever seems to see him again. But you know that something is going on in that house. People around are impacted. Strange goings on are noted, and this man and this house are avoided…until Dave and Abe visit it. (Someone describes the house as such: “I don’t know if you’ve spent time in the Catskills. From a distance, say, the parking lot of the old Caldor’s (which became an Ames that became a Stop ‘N’ Shop) in Huguenot, they’ve always made me think of a herd of giant animals, all standing grazing on the horizon.
Up close, when you’re driving among them with the early morning light breaking over their round peaks, they seem incredibly present, more real than real, these huge solid heaps of rock that wear their trees like mile-long scarves. You glance at them, trying to keep your eyes on the road, which is already pretty busy with people driving up for a weekend getaway, and somehow you wouldn’t be surprised if the mountain closest to you were to cast off its trees in one titanic shrug and start to lumber away, a vast, unimaginable beast.
When you turn off onto whatever secondary road you need to take, and you’re following its twists and turns back into the mountains, and the ground is steep to either side of you, opening every now and then on a meadow, or an old house, you think, Here, there are secret places.”)
Anyway, one thing leads to another and Abe and Dan find themselves at a crossroad. Or at least one of them finds themselves there. The other one crosses the threshold. This is where this quote by one of the characters (I think Abe’s wife) takes on a whole new meaning: “You can make an oyster surrender its pearl…All you need is persistence and a sharp enough knife.”
This is a beautiful, tedious, atmospheric novel…scary only when you realize that all of life is trying to make peace with what we lose.
So all existence is an exercise in exorcism.
And that’s he Fisherman’s sobering lesson.
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