Recent Reading: Sharks and more Sharks

One of the projects I’d like to work one, somewhere down the line, is essentially a deranged giant monster horror/thriller that should not exist. Since I’m primarily a fan of these in film form, rather than fiction, I set myself the task of reading a bunch of books that serve as an introduction to the form in a literary sense.

The result was Shark Week.

I kicked off with Steve Alten’s The Meg because a) I’d really enjoyed the recent film in all it’s goofy glory, and b) it had a surprising number of sequels, which immediately caught my eye as a researcher interested in series. 

The Meg in book form is a very different beast to the film. There are still giant sharks, of course, and plenty of people who get eaten along the way, but the character traits wrapped around the default archetypes are different enough to mean something. Our protagonist, Jonas Taylor, isn’t just a retired navy deep sea specialist, but now has a PhD in Sharks and a not-so-whackadoodle theory that megaladons are still alive after his experiences in hte navy. His ex-wife isn’t a fellow sub specialist, but a highly-ambitious journalist whose life has been destroyed by protagonist Jonas Taylor’s obsessions and isn’t quite an ex yet. Everyone else is similarly a few steps sideways from the film adaptation, giving us a decent spread of POV’s and a whole lot of internal dramas to play out.

The Meg isn’t a subtle book, but its a hell of a lot of fun and a really great example of a how to handle a few aspects of genre (for example: give the antagonist a POV, give the reader a basic education in the “science!” of  your setting; big motivations leading to dumb, stupid decisions). Plus, it does that thing I live as a reader: take an absurd concept, then play it absolutely straight.

Here’s what’s interesting, though: the cinematic version of The Meg is undoubtably a tighter story. It’s had to winnow down the details and streamline things, tie it together with a unity and underlying action that makes a good film work. And it’s a hell of an enjoyable film, if you dig a goofy monster film (although my partner, who does enjoy a goofy monster film, was not as big a fan).

At the same time, I’m not sure that the film is as outright enjoyable as the book. Despite it’s sprawling plot and increasingly goofy motivations, with folks swearing vengeance against the Meg and setting out to hunt it every couple of chapters, the fiction version couples a sense of outright glee with the feeling that you’re getting a glimpse into secret worlds and learning details.

And that can be just as powerful as a tightly woven story. More so, if you’re a certain kind of reader. 

I’m curious to read the sequels to see what they replicate, what the escalate, and what they allow to fall by the wayside.

THE MEG, BY STEVE ALTERN: AMAZON (AUS | UK | USA); KOBO: BOOKTOPIA

The other half of informal Shark Week reading was Peter Benchley’s Jaws, the New York Times bestseller that went on to be adapted into the Stephen Spielberg film and launch one of the most iconic soundtrack riffs fo all time.

I raved about this book a few times while reading it, and I’m probably going to do so here: it’s worth a read. Like a lot of 80s films that seemed to spin off endless sequels, Jaws is one of those stories whose original qualities got burried under the absurdity of trying to reiterate a simple story. Going back to the source is interesting, because it shows just how smart the book is: the broad metaphors of class, the conflicts between intellect-driven decisions and Sheriff Brody’s insticts, the way that the conflict of stopping the shark is routinely tied to really personal goals in the protagaonists. 

It’s even more interesting to read this back-to-back with The Meg, because you can both see the influences on Altern’s approach, but also the genre traits worth replicating. Once again, there’s the POV given to the animal as a means of escalating tension; the minor characters who get a few moments in the sun before getting eaten; the big, not-at-all-related-to-this motivations that both tie into and get subsumed by the marauding shark; the exploration of the science of sharks, even as we’re hunting it down.

It’s definitely the stronger of the two novels, although I suspect that The Meg may be a little more fun if you’re the kind of reader who likes their giant monster stories to be a little goofy and cheesy.

JAWS, by PETER BENCHLEY: AMAZON (AUS | UK | USA); KOBO; BOOKTOPIA