The Fisherman by John Langan. Finally, got around to reading this after reading some of his short story collections and his novel
House of Windows.
It's tale is recounted via a series of nested narratives. Abe recounts certain experiences that he is trying to come to terms with. Abe lives in upstate 1990s New York near the Ashokan Reservoir. He works for IBM, and had been married to his beloved wife Marie for nearly two years when she contracted breast cancer and succumbed very quickly. In his grief, he feels the compulsion to turn to fishing, and finds that it's the thing that he needed to find some level of peace and organization to help him move forward and get him out of his alcoholic funk. As the years pass, his co-worker Dan Drescher loses his wife and two children in a tragic car accident. Abe reaches out to him and invites him along, and the two strike up what is not quite a friendship but a mutual form of recovery, fishing the streams in the woods around Woodstock.
God, but I love that first cast. You pinch the line to the rod, open the bail, lift the rod over your head, and snap your wrist, releasing the line as you do. The motion whips up the rod, taking the pink and green spinner-bait at the end of the line back and then out, out and out and out, trailing line like a jet speeding ahead of its contrail, climbing to the top of the parabola whose far end is going to put the lure right next to those fish.
When Dan suggests that the two head up to an elusive fishing spot called Dutchman's Creek, Abe's intrigued, because he's never heard of it, and Dan is somewhat evasive when it comes to explaining how he learned about it. Yeah, uh, he read about it in a very old edition of a vintage fishing guide. Yeah, that's the ticket. While on their way to the spot, they stop by their usual diner and when their destination comes up, they're treated to a lengthy story from Howard the cook (who originally hails from
Providence, wink wink) about the history of Dutchman's Creek and why people avoid it. What follows is a long narrative that makes up the second part of the book, a part that Abe notes he is able to recall with complete clarity. Why, he even remembers information that he shouldn't be able to and details he's certain this cook didn't actually relate to them but he just
knows, which Abe admits is very strange and disturbing even as he commits the story to paper...
Howard's story, which is the story of a reverend who became obsessed with the legend of Dutchman's Creek, which is the story related to him by the elderly Lottie Schmidt, who harks back to the days with her father Rainier and their family in the 1900s (like matrushka dolls), and starts with the settlers who inhabited the region a century before the creation of the Ashokan Reservoir that now fills the valley. A mysterious figure on a horse drawn cart appeared in a now long submerged settlement, and somehow ingratiated himself with one of the wealthier locals, the tyrannical landowner Cornelius Dort after the man suffered a tragedy. Cornelius' Guest, he becomes known as, and strange stories dog his presence, of late night visitors, people who walk oddly or look strange.
When the 100+ year old Dort passes away in the 1900s, after futilely attempting to use his money and influence to fight the creation of the Reservoir, he leaves his fortune to this stranger. Further weirdness and unpleasantness occurs in the Reservoir work camps full of Hungarians and Italians and Austrians and so on. After the trampling death of a Hungarian worker's wife, her guilt-ridden husband sought out and made a deal with The Guest.
'The man understands what it is to lose - what it is to lose. He listens. He understands. He doesn't see why a man should suffer for what he didn't mean to do in the first place. Things happened, that was all. He doesn't ask for what you don't have. Strength - to add your strength to his. He gives you his cup. Not compassionate - no, he's not compassionate; he's interested, interested, yes. He will help you if you will help him. Things happened. Why not? Your strength. All he asks is that you drink from his cup. His task is almost done. Why not? He will help you if you help him.' He repeats those words a half-dozen more times, until Italo slaps him. 'He's a fisherman,' George says, and something about that statement strikes him as so funny he starts to giggle, then to chuckle, then to laugh, then to howl. It doesn't matter how many more slaps Italo gives him, he won't stop laughing.'
Rainer Schmidt, a former professor of languages who had to flee Hamburg after a scandal involving his dabbling in more...arcane...studies decides something must be done about this "bad business".
The final third of the book involves Dan and Abe continuing to seek out Dutchman's Creek, even as it becomes more obvious to Abe that Dan knows more about it than could be found in some old guide or tome of local legends...
