In his superb new novel THE FISHERMAN (Word Horde, paper, $16.99), John Langan also manages to sustain the focused effect of a short story or a poem over the course of a long horror narrative, and it’s an especially remarkable feat because this is a novel that goes back and forth in time, alternates lengthy stretches of calm with extended passages of vigorous and complex action, and features a very, very large monster. Like Robert Aickman, Langan is a short story writer by inclination; “The Fisherman” is only his second novel, and this one took him over a dozen years to finish.

The story is about a Hudson Valley man named Abe who takes up fishing after the death of his wife; eventually he begins fishing with a co-worker named Dan, whose family was killed in a car accident for which he feels responsible. At a certain point, Dan mentions a place called Dutchman’s Creek, which doesn’t seem to appear on any of the standard maps and which nobody they know has ever fished. On their way, they stop at a diner — it’s upstate New York, so you have to — and hear, in great detail, a frightening local legend about the place, from the time, early in the 20th century, when the Ashokan Reservoir was being constructed. The tale involves a magician, reanimation and a huge mythic beast, but the men go on to Dutchman’s Creek anyway. Abe, who narrates, tells himself, as characters in horror stories do, that it can’t be true; Dan may have other reasons for forging ahead.

“The Fisherman” is unusually dense with ideas and images, and, with the tale heard in the diner taking up the middle third of the book, it’s oddly constructed. But there’s a beauty in its ungainliness. Langan writes elegant prose, and the novel’s rolling, unpredictable flow has a distinctive rhythm, the rise and fall of its characters’ real grief. These fishermen are restless men, immobilized but never truly at peace. Again and again, they cast their lines in the hope of catching something, anything, that will restore them to who they were. Abe characterizes himself as “desperate for any chance to recover what I’d lost, no matter what I had to look past to do so,” and you feel that sad urgency on every page of his strange and terrifying and impossible story.

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Langan’s novel wears its heart on its sleeve. In Brian Evenson’s science-fiction horror novella THE WARREN (Tom Doherty/Tor, paper, $11.99), the organ on display is a brain, specifically that of a character called X, who lives in some sort of underground facility with, often, only a computer monitor to talk to. He has a lot of time to think, and the big question for him is whether or not he is actually a person — and if so, in what sense? The monitor isn’t helpful on this subject. X’s brain, it seems, has been programmed with other people’s memories, as a way of preserving them against the likelihood of extinction. As the story begins, he wonders first if anyone else is still alive, and then whether any “material” remains to serve as a repository for the thoughts and memories — the notional self — currently housed inside him. Otherwise he might be the last of his kind. Whatever kind that is.

X’s brain turns out to be a wonderful setting for a haunted-house story, because all sorts of diverse spirits are slithering around in there and playing tricks on him. “Parts of me,” he says, “know things that other parts do not, and sometimes I both know a thing and do not know it, or part of me knows something is true and another part knows it is not true, and there is nothing to allow me to negotiate between the two.” This brain is treacherous. At one point X says, “I am not the only part of me doing this,” and later, more ominously, “I am working against myself.” He can fall asleep as himself (he thinks) and wake up as someone else, or several someones else. His struggle to find his way in this mental labyrinth is all the plot Evenson needs to spin a suspenseful, darkly comic tale. “Je est un autre” (“I is another”) Rimbaud said. We’ve all felt like that from time to time, but poor X feels it, multiplied, at every moment of his conscious life. “The Warren” is chilling because X’s situation is not only impossible but truly, inherently irresolvable. It ends as all horror stories should, with a question mark.