Reviews with content warning for Gore - Meg

Reviews tagging 'Gore'

Meg by Steve Alten

9 reviews

laboromi's review against another edition

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Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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marbleharbor's review against another edition

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The characters were very badly written. The first few chapters were so hard to read, I started skimming it. A poorly written ripoff of jurassic park. The movie is much better.

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andremay's review against another edition

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fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

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roach's review against another edition

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adventurous dark funny lighthearted tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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.

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seawarrior's review against another edition

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adventurous funny lighthearted tense

3.0

Meg is an exciting and bombastic novel starring a crew of paper-doll people, a term I use for characters with wafer-thin depth. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the women were the worst victims of Alten's lack of imagination when plotting his characters. I cannot vouch for the scientific accuracy of the story since I'm not a marine biologist, but some assertions did seem a little... fishy... Otherwise, the story was very entertaining to follow and I understand both why it was sold to movie producers immediately, and why it took several studios and thirty years for the movie to get made.

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groovy_boovy's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional informative mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

Definitely a little cheesy, but still a nail biting thriller I could not put down.

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katkinslee's review against another edition

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adventurous tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

It was rather misogynistic in parts and sometimes the language was rough, the romance came out of no where and the women weren't written very well.
Aside from these things it was so easy to read, I flew through it in one day and the action was really great. I'm not sure how accurate it is scientifically speaking but if you can put that aside it was an entertaining story.

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swimmermenitro's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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megj23's review against another edition

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adventurous dark medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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