Have you ever had something weird and unsettling happen while you were flyfishing? One time when I was a teen, I was fishing my favorite lake alone when a straight-line storm whipped up all of a sudden, a roiling pile of thick green clouds out of nowhere. I pulled my boat onto shore just as a wall of waves wept over the water. In the moments before the deluge, I watched a colony of ants quickly move their entire operation from a downed tree partially in the water, toward the sandy bank. Minutes later, the low part of that log was trounced. After the crazy microburst, I went back out and caught a bunch of great largemouth bass cruising the freshly disturbed edges of weed banks. But those prescient ants! How did they know what was coming?
Another time, there was this unnamed, elusive spring-fed pond in the middle of the national lakeshore that I wanted to remember how to get to, and so I strategically placed some ribbons of orange tape on tree branches to help me find my way back next time. (The pond was full of gregarious and plump hybrid sunfish who had found their way there who knows how.) But when I went to go back a few months later, the orange ribbons had been rearranged in a wide circle in the middle of the woods; someone was either fucking with me, or I just got plain disoriented. Either way, I got lost and became scared that someone was watching me as I wandered around the forest in meandering loops. I never found my way back to that magic pond full of hungry fish.
There was a morning just a few months ago, when I went to a river in the Ozarks to fish for smallmouth bass, and after a restless night I left perhaps too early and ended up at the access point well before sunrise. I suited up anyway and headed down to the river with big fish on my brain. I fished a few bends downstream in the predawn haze, until I saw what I thought was some charred firewood remains on a gravel bank a little ways off. As I approached the pile, I saw that this dark mass was not the rustic scene I had imagined. Instead, it was a black roller bag laying on its back, gaping open and contents strewn about: some diaphanous clothes, a red bra, a make- up kit itself scattered, and…a long blonde wig, ends waving in the current at the edge of the water. What the hell?!? I quickly headed downstream, away from the yard sale. The fishing was slow that morning and I called it early, driving home with the disconcerting feeling that I’d just barely dodged a gruesome situation.
Then, there was the time that my life got hijacked by three small aliens that I helped spawn, beings who made me care for them and schlep them around until they were big enough to start dominating me, and I even tried to teach them to flyfish along the way, but it didn’t really take with any of them. Of course—that’s just my everyday life with my kids. I made choices and am having to live with the consequences, sublime and mundane by turns: Lunch prep in the morning, school drop-offs and pick-ups, meltdowns and tantrums mixed with hugs and unbelievable sweet pronouncements. (“Dad, here’s a really good question: How does my brain think?”)
I tell these four short stories because I thought of each of them as I read J.C. Vande Zande’s new horror novel, Blood of the Witness Tree (Montag, 2025). This book is horrifying, and not just because it involves scary paranormal situations with possessed coyote-men and other chimerical spirits. It’s also freaky because it’s about a narrator who is grappling with the ever awkward, reliably uncomfortable dynamics of trying to relate to his three children who are becoming adults, each in their own unfamiliar ways. A big part of the novel involves a flyfishing trip taken by Isaac the narrator and his willing if not exactly eager son Carson. They’re off to the Pigeon River area of Michigan, and they get caught up in a diabolical revenge plot that entangles the ecosystem (the book is a sequel to 2024's The Dance of Rotten Sticks, but I can confidently say that it stands alone, as I didn’t read the first story).
J.C. Vande Zande. (Photo: Courtesy the author)
Horror novels are not my preferred genre. In fact, this might be the first self-described "horror" book I’ve ever read. (And yet, I do love teaching Frankenstein, so…maybe I was more primed for Vande Zande’s book than I realized.) But what really got me was the simmering domestic drama percolating beneath, or really throughout, the story. Navigating the tense conversations, the passive aggressive jabs and near misses between Isaac, Carson and the daughters Ashley and Emily—these things made me positively squirm as I read the book. The mystical horror stuff was honestly the sideshow for me; I was gripped by the family matters.
Then there is the flyfishing, which is why you are reading this review on this website. Now this part of the novel is uncanny in other ways. At times it was as if I was reading a reboot of Nick Adams, having been transported 100 years forward: “He was in a tent. He was camping.” (Vande Zande makes this allusion plain in the book, with the narrator admitting he prefers Hemingway to Thoreau.) Other times, I could hear the ghost of Norman Maclean in the pages: “A river was like life, and each downstream bend came with the promise of opportunity. One just needed to keep moving forward.” The fishing scenes, relentlessly dry-fly oriented, are riveting and true to form. The experienced reader can feel the various trout hooked, caught, and lost. And the ambience of the place is legit: anyone who has trudged through Michigan cedar swamps scouting for brook trout will feel embedded in the forest of the prose.
The interesting thing about horror/fantasy fiction is that you can just break all sorts of physical rules in the act of storytelling. Haunted cabins can turn into piles of leaves, wolves can meld into men, and creepy voices can emanate out of the trees while your main character is trying to focus on landing a fly right behind a certain rock. (Actually, this has happened to me too, when eerie sounds in the wind and water sound like moaning human voices.)
Vande Zande has written a thrilling, surreal novel about parenting, becoming-adult responsibility in our fraught era (the smartphone batteries are always dying at just the wrong moment!), and the hazards of family camping vacations. And, to borrow from another flyfishing storyteller, a river runs through it. Tight lines, until they turn into spiderwebs strangling you.
Christopher Schaberg is an English professor and the Director of Public Scholarship at
Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of 10 books, including Fly-Fishing (Duke University Press, 2023)