Yes, that is a real paragraph, and no, it’s not exceptional by The Fisherman’s standards. I tell myself that this was a good thing.” In the aftermath of the scandal, our former instructors would have nothing to do with me. But I was cut by it, as well, which I suppose was just. And let the blade that is to fall, fall on you. You can do this your way, if that is what you want. I was halfway to passing him the length of cloth I had rolled up in my jacket pocket, but the sound of his laughter stayed my hand. I asked him if he had brought the necessary materials. I had come prepared for the task, but Wilhelm insisted he be the one to convey the object of our quest to our instructors. “I knew that, if the flower we had been sent for was not transported in the appropriate manner-wound about three times with a piece of cloth torn from the foot of a shroud-then the consequences for whoever was carrying it would be dire. It was, I felt, the least I deserved for what I had allowed to happen to Wilhelm.” Rainer looks at Jacob. I was well-liked, and had not divided my colleagues the way Wilhelm had. I could have fought the move to oust me I might have succeeded, too. Questions were asked, my name came up, conversations were had, and in no time, I was readying my family to leave for America. “This was what led to me being dismissed from the University. We have characters like Rainer monologuing for pages at a time, including paragraphs like this where he vomits up his backstory like a plate of bad fish. In a moment of supreme irony, this story about an eldritch fisherman is amazingly dry. Let’s find out why it’s not scary and how it could have been. But a much bigger problem is that the novella isn’t at all scary, despite being called Der Fisher: A Tale of Terror. It’s also unclear who the first-person narrator is much of the time, because the story is being relayed through a cook who heard it from a minister who heard it from an elderly adherent who heard it from her husband and her father. Rainer’s story is the longest story within a story I’ve ever seen. This second novella is told to Abe and Dan by a side character, but its main character is a stonemason named Rainer. Spoilers: It’s thanks to antics of the eponymous Fisherman. In the middle of that novella is another novella which provides the backstory for why the creek is spooky in the first place. It takes a while to get going, * but it’s quite spooky once it does. But when they cast their lines in a stream with a mysterious source, they get hooked into a story of poignant grief, cosmic horror, and fishing metaphors. The first novella is about Abe and Dan, two friends who take up fishing as a coping mechanism for losing their families to illness and accident. John Langan’s The Fisherman appears to be a novel, but in a surprise twist, it’s actually two novellas in a trench coat.
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