“Sure, you think you know what’s waiting for you under the water, but believe you me, you can never be sure what’s going to take your hook.” -“The Fisherman”, John Langan

Oftentimes in reading horror I find myself commenting, “This could have been about one hundred pages shorter and I’d be happy with it.” Not the case with “The Fisherman”, in fact, I wanted one hundred more pages of this mesmerizing tale. The combination of contemporary and folk-lore type prose really solidified this story. I was surprised, at first, with how much I liked the jump in narratives but I can be a bit of a stick in the mud about pacing and attention directing. This story is really, really big and I loved every whisper of it.

I also don’t think this is so easy as to just hide under the umbrella of the “grief metaphor” or “at it’s heart, it’s about loss.” Sure, there’s touches of those concepts; I don’t know a horror tale that doesn’t have them. But Langan carves out something a little deeper with this book. This is a good, old fashioned, new century scary story that’s going to make me rethink my summers on lake shores, rod in hand and bobber bouncing.

5/5 It really hooked me.