Reviews with content warning for Animal death - Meg

Reviews tagging 'Animal death'

Meg by Steve Alten

7 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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rosieholmes99's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging tense fast-paced

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

3.0

movie was better. had better characters and more plausible which is saying something lol. Has the classic dude writing a science fiction book and all the women in it are tall and sexy. Plus of course all the women hate eachother for some reason? But otherwise glad i read it. probably won’t read again tho

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flooooo's review against another edition

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Completely over the top and unrealistic - and yet still boring.

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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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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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jana07's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging informative tense medium-paced

4.25

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nocturnalbookworm's review against another edition

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adventurous tense fast-paced

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

3.0

I found that all the characters fell under the category of actively dislike to just ok. While I can definitely appreciate stories about unlikeable characters (and I do think the unlikable ones in this were meant to be), the heroes of our story weren’t just flawed they felt on dimension and very stereotypical action move stock characters.

No real grammatical errors or situations where the wording didn’t make sense. This one definitely took a very fast paced action story style, that worked for the story. The transitions in perspective were done nicely.

I had wondered upon starting this if it would be a similar situation to Jaws with the shark being only a minor backdrop in a mostly human based conflict story. I was happy to find this not the case with Meg. It was just the thing to break me of a reading slump, fun and action packed brain candy.

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