The Fisherman by John Langan ‹ Literary Hub

March 27, 2025, 9:15am

Small presses have had a rough year, but as the literary world continues to conglomerate, we at Literary Hub think they’re more important than ever. Which is why, every (work) day in March—which just so happens to be National Small Press Month—a Lit Hub staff member will be recommending a small press book that they love.

The only rule of this game is that there are no rules, except that the books we recommend must have been published, at some time, and in some place, by a small press. What does it mean to be a small press? Unfortunately there is no exact definition or cutoff. All of the presses mentioned here are considered to be small presses by the recommending editors, and for our purposes, that’s going to be good enough. All of the books mentioned here are considered to be great by the recommending editors, too. If one intrigues you, consider picking it up at your local bookstore, or ordering through Bookshop.org, or even directly from the publisher.

Today, we’re recommending:

The Fisherman by John Langan
published by Word Horde (2016)

If you don’t already know, I’m a big genre-fiction reader—and we are in the middle of a golden age of speculative indie presses. Whether your tastes run to sci-fi, fantasy, horror, mystery, romance… there are presses doing amazing work for you, often beautifully designed to boot. I could probably fill a whole month talking about such presses, but in the interests of brevity, I bring you one of the titans of the field and perhaps their biggest writer (to my eyes, anyway): Word Horde and John Langan.

Langan has been steadily publishing exceptionally good horror for a few decades now and his shorts, which range from out and out fright-fests to Hawthorne/James/Irving-esque classical American eerieness, are always a pick-and-mix of delights—but his second novel, The Fisherman, is absolutely his most beloved work so far. Set around the corner from my house and structured like a Melville-ian story-within-a-story (seriously, Langan knows how to fit into and also push forward the tradition of weird American novelists), it’s about two guys going fishing by the Ashokan Reservoir, and also about the building of that reservoir at the turn of the last century. It is a beautiful novel about grief, about the sins of American industry, about the ambitions of ‘great’ men—and also a genuinely scary (in real-world and eldritch terms) one about madness and the things that lurk on the edges of the world.

Langan will, I have little doubt, go down in history as the great bard of the stranger corners of Hudson Valley—surpassing, I wager, even Washington Irving—and a good deal of his success can be put down to his having a steady home at Word Horde for several books now (with two more recently announced in the offing). Presses that support their writers? Oh we love to see it—and isn’t that really what small presses are all about?

–Drew Broussard, Podcasts Editor