Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies

You know that expression, "don't meet your heroes," because you're just setting yourself up for disappointment? I feel like I just ignored that advice... and it turned out okay anyway!

The Fisherman is one of my all-time favorite books. I'm talking in Top 3, easily. Because of that, I've ironically always been hesitant to visit any of John Langan's other works because I was convinced there was no way anything else could live up to it, and I'd just end up walking away let down, so why bother? I've owned this book for about three years before I finally decided to pick it up and give it a chance. And while I was right in that it wasn't life-changing, it was still extremely solid.

This was another situation where the author's note to the reader at the end of the book really colored my perception of what came before it and gave me a new appreciation. At first I was confused as to why so many of these short stories in this collection had such similar details. At least three of them deal with adult sons trying and failing to emotionally connect with their fathers. A fictionalized version of upstate New York is the setting for the majority of them (CUNY gets name-dropped a lot), and everyone is a second-generation Scottish immigrant. Also this is one of the most aggressively Gen X books I've ever read; damn near every protagonist was either a kid or a teenager in the 80's.

What stuck out a series of distractingly uniform details made more sense once I realized that these were collectively meant to be literal autobiographical elements of the author's life. In retrospect, it is right there in the title, but went over my head and was a pleasing little revelation at the end.

As is the case with most short story collections, some were stronger than others, but nothing here was outright bad, and the good ones were really good. I'll specifically remember "Mirror Fishing" (I get really squeamish with palm/hand injuries and this had an intense ending that had me physically uncomfortable), "The Supplement" (yet another fresh exploration into themes of grief), and "What Is Lost, What Is Given Away" (I just found it to be a really unique premise for a missing person situation) for a very long time. There are also glimpses of a coherent cosmic worldbuilding in the background of some of these stories if you squint hard enough, and I'm now more interested (and willing!) to dive into his other works to see if there's more going on there.