His novel, The Fisherman, opens with an overt reference to Melville’s Moby Dick, and he delivers a text that’s actually in dialogue with Melville’s work, not simply a re-hash or some kind of hackneyed allusion that’s meant to “fancy” it up in other words, Langan understands why Moby Dick works, what’s appealing and enduring about it, and he creates a text that can almost be read as a continuation, or at least a companion. Now, I love dragons, and I’m not beholden to the classics like some kind of purist, but if you’re going to invoke one of The Big Ones, then you better come to play. There were many reasons, but a big one was the novel’s ham-fisted handling of Melville’s epic it basically took the basic structure (obsessed captain hunts big monster), threw in a faint thematic resonance (obsession), and then trotted out the story’s beats in the most mundane way possible. It was a fantasy novel that purported to be a kind of re-telling of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, but with dragons. Earlier this year, I reviewed a book for Strange Horizons titled The Black Leviathan.
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