As time passes, Abe begins to look after Dan’s wellbeing, and the two form a friendship of sorts. Dan, ejected from the vehicle, was the lone survivor. Dan’s loss is a counterpoint to that of Abe’s where Abe and Marie had time together to come to terms with the looming eventuality, Dan’s wife Sophie, and their twin toddlers, were killed in an instant, when their car was struck by an eighteen-wheeler. As the years pass, tragedy strikes one of Abe’s coworkers, Dan Dresher as well. This long-forgotten activity provides Abe with a sense of organization and meaning after the loss of Marie he structures his entire existence around this introspective sport.

One day, Abe wakes up and has an unshakable compulsion to go fishing. Throughout their short tenure together, always lurking in the background, was the constant realization that death would come for her.Īfter Marie’s passing, as can be expected, Abe went through a depression, drinking heavily and neglecting his responsibilities at his job at IBM. Abe is a widower whose wife, Marie, died of breast cancer after about a year and a half of marriage. Right at the novel’s offset, Langan makes it abundantly clear to the reader that this story is a tragedy intermingled with a heavy dose of metaphysical anomie. This book is written in the style of a memoir, in which the narrator, Abe, recounts certain life experiences that he is trying to come to terms with. The Fisherman is a somber meditation on the consequences of loss and the toll it takes on the human spirit.

How does someone go on after all they love has been taken away? Do they move on with their lives? And if so, for what reason? Or perhaps a more germane question is, what happens if an individual in mourning refuses to let go of what is lost? Langan examines this fundamental question, filtered through the lens of a tale of the supernatural. But this exact panic-inducing scenario is what John Langan explores in his novel, The Fisherman. As the old saying goes, by the grace of God go I.

A life insurance policy, after all, is designed to benefit your survivors, right? And yet, once in a while, I will awaken from a terrifying dream, heart racing, helpless in the knowledge that something awful has happened to my family.Īfter a few minutes, I have had the privilege of drifting off back to sleep in the knowledge that it was not real. Being a risk-averse individual, I have taken steps to ensure that my family will be OK in the event of my passing. Leaving temporal business unfinished as it were.

The only other thing that comes remotely close to this fear is imagining my death and leaving my family wanting. As a father and husband, the thing that scares me the most in this life is the untimely death of one of my children or my spouse.

The fisherman horror novel