"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part Three

In "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, the narrator, a physics professor with psychiatric problems--actually problems far more profound than any psychiatrist could treat--reveals to the reader that he has committed murder, or something approaching murder. Actually there is more than one murder, for, like a serial killer, he has gone after people, one after another, who live on the fringes of society. But are these really murders? Or is he a recruiter of sorts--a groomer--who lures his victims into his abysses? He writes:

If not murder, then let's say a fisher of men.

That suggestion is ironic of course, an inversion of the original. In Matthew 4:19, Jesus says:

"Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men."

In his own story, the narrator alludes to Edmond Hamilton, who alluded to Charles Fort before him, writing:

I think we're fished for.

The fish is a Christian symbol of course. Darwinists have co-opted that symbol for humorous and satirical purposes. You see it mostly on their cars. Darwinist or not, if we're fished for, we're all sooner or later going into the creel.

By the way, one who fishes draws in his catch. Remember the word.

* * *

The narrator remembers night fishing with his grandfather and his grandfather's friends. One of those friends, named Snuffy Smith after the comic strip character, tells a story of his own childhood in which he went into the cellar to look for some canned peaches for his mother. There he found the shape of a girl that changed as he looked upon it. "And her eyes were like burning white pinpricks in the darkness." Elsewhere in the story, the narrator describes a night on the lake:

     The stars wheel above the lake like a drunken tapestry, a billion blazing pin pricks [. . .].

There are, then, stars in the shape-shifters and shape-shifters in the stars. Or, shape-shifters are star stuff, just like us, except they're not the good kind. Remember here how the hero in The Incredible Shrinking Man describes the stars: "God's silver tapestry spread across the night." Setting aside the mixed metaphor of a tapestry that wheels, we can say that God's tapestry is not drunken but properly ordered. It is designed, just as every tapestry is designed.

* * *

There is also in "Night Fishing" a story of something pulled up from the bottom of the lake, the way the aliens in Hamilton's story trawl the surface of the earth from their high-atmospheric ships. The narrator is keeping secrets from his psychiatrist--and from us. What was the drawn-up thing? Was it an alien entity, a visitor from the void? Or was it simply a dead body? The author may also be keeping secrets from us. Is there really something cosmic, supernatural, or super-scientific going on in his story? Or does the thing of which he writes exist only in the abyssal depths of the narrator's soul? In other words, is the horror external or internal? Another question: has the author put himself into his own story? It is, after all, about transformations. He writes: "[T]his does not have to be any one thing." It, and possibly everything else, can be many, or any of its own choosing.

* * *

The thing in the box that the narrator has bought from an estate sale--the thing from the abyss--is a shape-shifter. It is in service to this shape-shifter that the narrator, now in adulthood, does his own night fishing among outcasts, what people might call the dregs of society. For example, the narrator's latest victim, the only one who actually makes an appearance in the story, is a transvestite. (Trawl, draw, drag, dredge, and possibly dregs are related words.) In an imaginary session with his psychiatrist, the psychiatrist asks him, "You think it followed you . . . through time, from that night on the lake?" After a while, the narrator says, "That night on the lake, it saw my face [. . . .] It saw something wrong with my soul. It saw an easy mark." In other words, a thing brought up--like Dagon or Cthulhu--from an abyss looked into him and recognized also an abyss. And now he goes about its work and his.

* * *

The author of "Night Fishing" is one person but has attempted to become another, complete with a name change. Emulating God, he has attempted to speak word into the creation of something new. Similarly, the thing in his story is one thing, then becomes another. The narrator may have been one person before becoming another, but his soul appears to have been already ruined when he first saw the thing. Maybe he was ruined at his conception. This can't be original sin, though, because the law governing this story--and the author's beliefs--won't allow it. The boy in the story is a transvestite, in other words, someone pretending to be another he is not. Using the object that was one thing before transforming itself into another, the narrator introduces the boy into his world. The boy thereby also becomes something else. You could say that he undergoes a transition. So the narrator, more or less a groomer, recruits the boy into his abyss. He is a fisher of men but an inversion of Christian fishers of men, who recruit their fellows into faith in God and his Creation, also called Cosmos.

* * *

In "Night Fishing," Caitlín R. Kiernan has synthesized what I think are the two main themes or images in Weird Tales #367, first, the abyss or void, and, second, an alien presence among us. Both are treated in this issue as sources of cosmic horror. Or maybe his story was the starting point for this themed issue and the other authors were invited to write variations on his two themes. (Probably not. More likely this was convergent evolution--or conformist creation, if there can be such a thing. Or maybe a better word for it is groupthink.) I should also emphasize here the theme and imagery of the sea, for the sea is in "Night Fishing" as well as in the other works so far in the Cosmic Horror Issue. But then we should remember that abyss and void may also refer to the sea and did from the beginning, for they are both in the creation story, in the Book of Genesis.

So far, these allusions or references--other connections, too--are to:

• The Book of Genesis, specifically the story of creation

• The New Testament

• "The City in the Sea" by Edgar Allan Poe

• Mythical and pseudoscientific lost continents

• "Nemesis" by H.P. Lovecraft

• "Dreamland" by Edgar Allan Poe

• "The Space Visitors" by Edmond Hamilton

• The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort

• Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by Friedrich Nietzsche

• "There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea," a traditional song

• "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" by Dylan Thomas

I hope this list is complete. It may not be.

* * *

There is also a theme in Mr. Kiernan's story of shape-shifting, transition, or transformation. This shape-shifting is nothing but horrific. That's something for us to remember. The shape-shifter or skin-walker is a monster among us. Watch out.

* * *

Believers in God are seekers after spiritual transcendence. Non-believers pursue in its place transition, transformation, transgression, transgenderism, transvestism, trans-humanism, and other trans-systems, trans-processes, trans-experiences, trans-beliefs, trans-etc. Believers in God also believe in Cosmos--order, law, purpose, meaning. Non-believers see, fear, love, hate, pursue, and embrace Chaos--disorder, confusion, the void, the abyss, meaninglessness, destruction, ultimately death.

* * *

Another theme, motif, or plot device: the opening. In "The City in the Sea," the old man is sent on his journey after opening a package. In "A Ghost Story for Christmas," the narrator encounters black emptiness upon opening a door. In "The Forest Gate," the narrator passes through the eponymous opening to experience his own horrors. And in "Night Fishing," the narrator and his victim peer into an abyss by opening a box. One aspect of the thing in the box is "a book with a cracked leather binding, like the family Bible my mother kept on the coffee table." One of course opens a book, like a door through which one may pass. Inside--on the other side--may be glories. On the other hand, as in the Necronomicon or "The King in Yellow," there may be horrors. Opening has two meanings. First is from the verb, to open, the action of opening. Second is the noun, opening, denoting an empty space, a doorway or gateway, a gap, a hole, an open mouth, an orifice, the hole in the numeral zero, a void, such as the void in the narrator's soul.

* * *

Another aspect of the thing is "a stone disk with seven sides, carved from greenish soapstone that feels oddly greasy to the touch." As in "The City in the Sea," there is a strange object, a kind of sculpture. The strange object or sculpture, sometimes a box, is in all kinds of genre fiction, including The Maltese Falcon, "The Call of Cthulhu," "Claimed!" by Francis Stevens, "The Calamander Chest" by Joseph Payne Brennan, "The Striped Chest" by Arthur Conan Doyle, and so on. There are so many that there could be an Internet Strange Object, Sculpture, and Box Database.

* * *

See what happens when you read Nietzsche? You write in brevities and put little breaks between them. He used numbers, I have used asterisks, and in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, the designer used little black Cthulhus.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley