Reviews - Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror

612 reviews for:

Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror

Steve Alten

3.46 AVERAGE

kg_wulf's review against another edition

2.0

challenging informative tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

poleksya's review against another edition

2.0

I don't really have a lot to say about this one. It's a book about a giant ancient shark that somehow survived in the Mariana trench. Now by an accident it's surfaced and it's hunting whales and eating people. Everything in this book is cheesy and predictable, from the characters, to the plot and those one-liners! Oh those one-liners! I couldn't help myself, but to roll my eyes every time I heard one.

I've listened to the audiobook, and it was like someone was reading a low budget action movie script to me. When I lost track of the book and my mind wandered off, I wouldn't even bother to go back and listen to it again, you can figure out what's going on without any effort.

At the beginning I did find it fun and entertaining, but I could predict every single thing that was going to happen and it just got boring by the end of it. I just didn't care about the ending and what's going to happen, I already had a pretty good guess. I'll probably listen to the MEG Origin, since it came together with this book and it's fairly short. But I'm excited about the movie though! I love a good cheesy action flick once in a while, and the trailer looks awesome!

tylerc's review against another edition

4.25

adventurous dark tense medium-paced

roach's review against another edition

4.0

adventurous dark funny lighthearted tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

The female heard every sound, registered every moment, tasted every trail, and saw every sight, for Carcharodon megalodon did not just move through the sea, the sea moved through the Megalodon.

I read Steve Alten's prehistoric monster shark novel Meg once before, around 15 years ago when I was still a teenager. I remember enjoying it a ton back then and I remembered my time with it fondly.
Recently I felt like revisiting it to see if it would still hold up.
I started reading an earlier print at first but switched to a modern version around a third of the way through after realizing that Alten revised and expanded his novel around 2005. The prose changed notably and it's the post-2005 text that I must have read as a teenager anyway.

Meg is probably what you expect from a monster shark book: It's a pulpy creature feature story with b-movie vibes that delivers lightweight entertainment without much depth, aside from the deep sea locations of course.
The characters aren't very sympathetic or that interesting. They serve their purpose to drive the story, but they don't present very engaging development or growth. There is some heavyhanded romantic drama and lots of corny dialog. The relationship between the main character and his cheating ex-wife for example makes for a lot of the central non-shark conflict and it's more dramatic than nuanced. Add to that the new love interest for the main character who is of course at least a decade younger than him, as was the style at the time.
The book really does feel at points like the creation of an older generation, but it luckily never crosses the line into genuinely offensive territory. It's just trashy entertainment and that might not even be despite the flaws, but rather because of them.

But that's not to say the book is just a sinking ship that's fun to observe. Alten manages to write some very fun and over-the-top aquatic action. The giant shark is portrayed gnashing through its victims in surprisingly visceral ways at points and the book offers a lot of neat set pieces.
Hell, it's cool to have a novel that has lengthy scenes at the bottom of the Mariana Trench at all and it describes those moments fairly effectively. The pseudo-science is hamstrung a lot of the time but it usually makes up for that by delivering entertaining scenarios.
The shark is a character herself to a degree as well which I also liked quite a lot. Though I still wonder if Alten was trying to say something about the female sex with this because this book has a lot of angry female characters, both human and shark, and the author likes to emphasize that at points. I think that kinda culminated when

the megalodon gave birth to a couple of baby sharks and immediately ate the only male one

. I don't know what's up with all of that, if there was an intentional symbolism to all of that or if I'm just overthinking it. But honestly, the way Alten wrote (about) women sometimes made me laugh a couple of times. Though to be fair, he also wrote pretty much all prominent female characters (again, both shark and human) as capable, strong-willed, and emancipated, and they were probably the more interesting characters in this book in general.

Anyway, this is nothing one can take very seriously. It's easy entertainment with some explosions and some loose guts. It's fun if you're into creature feature stories and just feel like a quick read. A shark week SyFy film in the shape of a book.
I enjoyed it quite a lot and I might even be inclined to read one or two of the many sequels this apparently got.
But it sure won't be something that will have much of a lasting impact on you, I'm gonna assume. Unless, like me, you read this for the first time as an impressionable teenager and started getting even more obsessed with deep sea creatures and the Mariana Trench afterwards.

Content Warnings