220 Sharks: The Animal Answer Guide
Famous novels that feature sharks include Hemingway’s The Old Man
and the Sea. Sharks tear apart the giant Blue Marlin that Santiago finally
catches. Santiago has nothing but disdain for many of the sharks that attack
his fish but is highly respectful of the superpredatory mako that does the
most damage. Hemingway was an avid big-game fisher and included sharks
in other books, most notably Islands in the Stream.
Other shark-focused novels include Steve Alten’s MEG: A Novel of Deep
Terror (1996) and its sequels. In MEG, a deep-sea diver encounters the
presumably extinct giant Megatooth Shark (“Meg” for short) in the very
deep Marianas Trench (see “What is the largest shark that ever lived?” in
chapter 1). A series of unfortunate events brings Meg up to shallow water,
where it wreaks havoc on humanity before the hero manages to kill it, from
the inside. The Alten books have not received critical acclaim.
Resurrecting Meg seems too tempting a plot device to have been ig-
nored by other authors. In Extinct by Charles Wilson (1997), a nuclear test
in the South Pacific awakens and frees a Meg from the Marianas Trench,
again. Another Meg search sets the stage for The Midnight Sea by B. Luci-
ano Barsuglia (1997). And another escaped Meg stars in The Arc by Paul A.
Rudd (2010).
We are aware of two fairly recent graphic novels about sharks. The Shark
King, by R. Kikuo Johnson (2012), is a retelling of the Hawaiian legend of
the king of sharks (described above in “What roles do sharks play in reli-
gion and mythology?”). Matt Dembicki’s Xoc: The Journey of a Great White
(2012) follows the adventures of a Great White that travels from the Faral-
lon Islands off San Francisco to Hawaii. The title gets its name from the
Mayan word for shark, xoc, which is thought by some to be the origin of the
English word shark (see “How did sharks get their name?” in chapter 1).
And of course there is Jaws, the novel by Peter Benchley, and its se-
quels.
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