The Legend of Charlie Fish by Josh Rountree

There is a humanoid ichthyic personage in this story - he's in the title, this is not a spoiler - and people who know modern horror may expect him to be some variety of Deep One. But he isn't, really: he's much more of a Gill-Man, though one less inclined to sudden violence than his filmic counterparts, and part of a large diverse society in a way we don't see (as far as I remember) in any of those movies.

So, what I'm saying: this isn't Lovecraftian.

I know! It's rare and unexpected for anything roughly in the horror vein to have a trope that could be Lovecraftian but definitively isn't. Just for that, Josh Rountree deserves kudos.

He deserves them for more than that, though: The Legend of Charlie Fish is a remarkably assured first novel, with two different and believable first-person narrators, atmosphere to burn, a great story to tell, and a flair for telling that story just slightly slant to make it more interesting.

My TL; DR would be: I don't generally like horror, and nobody much reads Westerns these days. This is a great horror Western that's well worth your time, short enough to easily read in a day.

For the more-detail version: Floyd Betts is a carpenter in Galveston, in 1900. He mostly keeps to himself, is good at what he does, lives a quiet life in a boarding house. And he has to go out to Old Cypress to bury his father, a spiteful alcoholic he's been estranged from for decades.

Meanwhile, in Old Cypress, lives a young family: the mother is disliked by the town as a witch, though she's never done anything to hurt anyone. The father grew up there, but has been tainted by association. And the kids are Nellie, twelve, and Hank, nine.

Floyd finds Nellie and Hank in Old Cypress, orphaned, and decides to take them back to Galveston. Along the way they meet and save Charlie Fish: the reader knows all of that very early. I won't spoil who they save Charlie Fish from, or why those people want the fish-man back, but they do, and they follow.

Oh, one other thing. Ever heard of the Great Galveston Hurricane? It's on the way.

Rountree never says that Charlie's people have anything to do with the hurricane. He doesn't even really hint in that direction. But I want to believe it, for whatever apocalyptic reason: you may also want to believe that when you read Charlie Fish.

Oddly, this is a less quirky book than I expected, given the plot and the endorsement from Joe R. Lansdale. Nellie has a version of "the sight," so she can communicate, mostly empathically, with Charlie. But that, and Charlie's mere existence, are the only real fantasy elements. Rountree grounds all of the rest soundly in the mud and wood and heat of the time: these are realistic people in a realistic world, facing mortal danger from both nature and man, and living as best they can, according to their own lights and values. There's a surprising lot of philosophy for life in Charlie Fish, too, the hard-won standards of a life lived cross-grain to the people around you.

It's a short book that feels expansive, a Western that feels modern, a horror novel that feels hopeful. That's one hell of a Legend, and I recommend it.