That the shark be giant is absolutely de rigueur – despite the fact that some 90 percent of annual recorded shark attacks in the world involve fish smaller than basset hounds, such mishaps have zero dramatic potential. It has shrewd characterizations, multiple layers, and long evocative descriptive passages – in other words, in terms of giant killer shark novels, it wastes a lot of time.īecause the important category when dealing with giant killer shark novels is that whole ‘giant killer shark’ part. Benchley’s novel is actually a very smart, very urbane cautionary tale about human predators, about the voracity at the heart of human concupiscence. If this is true for bathos, how much more true must it be for bathyspheres, and so we come to what is perhaps the central question of modern hermeneutics: can a giant killer shark novel be good?In unraveling the ichthyologic etiology of such a query, you’d expect the ur-text to be Peter Benchley’s 1975 novel Jaws, but that isn’t quite right. It was the perennially underrated John Arbuthnot, so willingly lampooned in The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, who put it best: “The taste of the bathos is implanted by nature itself in the soul of man till, perverted by custom or example, he is taught, or rather compelled, to relish the sublime.” Meg: Hell's Aquarium By Steve Alten Variance Publishing, 2009
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