There are bullies, cruel relatives, teachers who have crossed boundaries, secrets that come to the surface… The supernatural elements are subtle, more weird and existential than gory or openly menacing – which is exactly what I love about these stories. His stories have always touched upon a very personal and human sort of horror (I’m thinking here of his masterful novel “The Fisherman”, which is just as much about grief as it is about literal monsters, or “Sephira”, which is about adultery, and incidentally, a supernatural creature is involved), and these stories follow that style. Some elements are recurrent: fishing, Scotland, small towns in the Hudson River valley, childhood memories, loss, fathers and sons. Langan’s more recent collections have always been loosely thematic, but this one more so: the subtitle “And Other Autobiographies” is quite revealing, as I feel this may be his most personal and auto-fictional collection yet. John Langan is one of those writers who never lets me down even when he’s not at top form, his stories still have enough skill and rich depths to plunder that I don’t mind at all – and he can write literary horror like nobody’s business! I somehow missed this newest collection of short stories when it came out in May, and compensated for the oversight by buying it, a copy of his newly re-edited first collection and two more books from Word Horde.

The fisherman book john langan