Der Fischer is called this, The Fisherman, because his quest is to catch this Leviathan, using ropes woven 'from the hairs of ten thousand dead men' and hooks forged from “the swords of a hundred dead kings' and use its powers to bring back, you guessed it, his own murdered wife and child. The Guest/Der Fischer is in fact a Hungarian scholar/magician from the sixteenth century who (to get too far in to the backstory’s backstory) stole a book called The Secret Words of Osiris from another arcane scholar of the time, Heinrich Khunrath. Rainer learns that the Guest is actually Der Fischer, a man whose magical efforts are focused to traveling to a kind of foundational level of reality: a black ocean where an incomprehensibly large sea monster, depicted in the Bible as the Leviathan, lives. Rainer ascertains that the bereaved husband went to the Guest, a mysterious figure who had lived reclusively for much of the previous century with the local feudal landowner after that landowner had himself lost his wife. Fortunately, the protagonist of this flashback is Rainer Schmidt, a disgraced former German academic and magic-dabbler. This would have been a normal tragedy if the wife had not returned a few days later, alive but eternally damp and with golden, fish-like eyes, and in possession of knowledge she should not have.

Abe thinks that their fishing days are over, until Dan abruptly asks him to join him in the search for Dutchman's Creek, which flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir.īy a narrow margin, the majority of the novel is actually a flashback to the early years of the 20th century, where a labor crew working on the Ashokan has a death, the wife of a worker crushed by a runaway carriage. However, the fishing season has a definite end point, and during the winter, Dan relapses into grief in the absence of his extended family support network.

Eventually, Abe is able to bring Dan to the water's edge with him, and fishing seems to be a way for him to cope as well. Over a decade after his loss, he is composed and at peace, when one of his younger coworkers, Dan, loses his wife and children in a car accident.

Eventually, he finds that the best way to cope with his grief is in the act of fishing, an activity that the author clearly enjoys himself from the way it is lovingly recounted and rendered. This novel, with a major 'fishing' theme and a secondary theme of “widowing,” was what I think of as a 'traditional' horror novel, where a relatable main character is drawn into events he doesn't understand by a friend with an agenda.Ībe works for IBM in upstate New York in probably the '80s or so, and loses his wife to cancer only a year into their marriage.

A Clash of Steel by C.B. Lee