Meg Hardcover – June 2, 1997

The Mariana Trench, located in the Pacific, is the deepest part of the ocean and is seven miles deep and 1,550 miles long. You hear the quote that we know more about deep space than we do about our own oceans and it's true. You wouldn't think anything big would be alive down there in the cold dark...but underwater volcanoes have created somewhat of a greenhouse effect on the ocean's bottom. A layer of heated ash has formed a canopy deep below that allows a strata of undersea life, including giant cuttlefish, dinosaurs...and megalodons, huge sharks that grow up to 80 feet long!Two groups of people have converged on the Mariana Trench for different reasons. The Defense Department has sent a Navy ship along with scientists to retrieve mysterious manganese nodules. The pilot of the sub sent down to get the nodules is Jonas Taylor, a naval commander. There is also a research ship studying underwater volcanoes in the area.During the naval dive, Jonas has a run-in with a megalodon and lives are lost. Since Jonas is the only survivor of the dive, the Navy thinks he's crazy when he tells them his sub was attacked by a giant shark. They believe he is delusional and he is dishonorably discharged from the service.Jonas spends the next seven years going back to college to get his doctorate in marine paleontology, with a specialization in megalodons. When an old friend asks for his help in figuring out what is going wrong with an earthquake early detection system set up in the Trench, Jonas begins to find himself drawn back toward making another dive, and facing an old terror.This revised and expanded edition of Meg also includes the prequel ebook Meg: Origins so if you buy this edition, don't make the mistake of also buying that.I'll start this review by saying this is one of the most awful books I've ever read. But saying that, I couldn't help but also enjoy it. It was the horrible fascination of looking at a train wreck, a car wreck, and a plane crash all at the same time. What was my first inkling that it was going to be bad? When one of the characters studying the underwater volcanoes sees a blip on the boat's radar and his first statement is to say its a megaladon! Bear in mind, this is before ANYONE has seen a meg in the book or is even LOOKING for one, or even comprehending there are megs still alive in the trench. But for some reason, this character is just AUTOMATIC....ITS A MEGALADON!! It was so comical.At the beginning of the book, the author Steve Alten argues, and I would say a bit tongue in cheek, that megs could really be alive swimming somewhere down in the depths and offers flimsy scientific evidence for this....but then includes a scene where a T-Rex takes on a meg even though megs didn't exist in the same time period as the dinosaurs. It is fascinating to think that early humans might have actually glimpsed one of these behemoths though, or might even have had to fight against them.There are some other far-fetched components of the book, like dinosaurs evolving gills, but once you realize this is a pulp novel, reminiscent of the early 1930s with modern trappings, you start to relax and let the fact that Meg is the anti-Moby Dick wash over you and you begin to enjoy its horror much as you would an Ed Wood film.All the main male characters are good looking and physically fit and all the women are beautiful and have big boobs. They engage in infantile Me Tarzan You Jane relationships right out of early Clive Cussler or bad 1970s paperback adventure series. Ok, it's not quite THAT bad, but it's on the level of high school boyfriend/girlfriend.There was also rampant drug abuse of prescription medications all through the book. I was kind of amazed how many tranquilizers the pilots and crew of the deep sea subs took when they were operating equipment worth millions and millions of dollars. And the fact that the main character who was supposed to be the best sub pilot had problems with claustrophobia! Doesn't seem like that would be your best line of work!Something else that created a lot of drag on the narrative, at least at the beginning of the book, were these abrupt info dumps of "non-fiction" material that just suddenly appear right out of Wikipedia. You'll be following the plot with the main character Jonas going down into the trench and then out of the blue, you'll have an encyclopedia entry about the trench or megs etc. It was quite jarring and thankfully they ended after the first 20-30% of the book.This book was so bad that it actually opened up its own space time continuum where it is the pinnacle of literature. Once I understood this, I realized that for what it was, Meg is a masterpiece, the Spinal Tap of monster novels. It's all tongue in cheek and is quite fun once you get into the spirit of it.One scene in the novel pretty much sums up the whole volume and it's the subject of the cover art of the edition I read. A surfing contest is going on (have no idea WHY it wouldn't be cancelled with a megalodon on the loose). The meg appears to chomp on the contestants but one surfer is able to juke and jive around the attacking shark, makes it to the beach on his board, WINS the contest, AND asks a pretty girl spectator to go out with him!If you can read the preceding paragraph and laugh, then you'll get some enjoyment out of this book. If you roll your eyes in disgust, then skip it.

I devoured this book as quick as a megalodon snacking on a surfer because it's just plain good. It's also a pretty quick read, a fast adrenaline ride across the Pacific in under 300 pages. Though it lacks the intricacies and depth of a Crichton novel, I think the LA Times summed it up nicely with "Jurassic Shark."Jonas Taylor's career as a submersible pilot ended abruptly one day in the Mariana Trench when he panicked and shot his sub to the surface, killing two crewmen. Nobody believed Jonas saw a prehistoric carcharadon megalodon coming at the sub because megalodons have been extinct for over 100,000 years. Or have they? In the intervening years, Jonas obsessively researched the ancestor to the great white shark, still privately believing he saw an attacking megalodon in the warm waters on the bottom of the ocean. Meanwhile, his ambitious reporter wife Maggie has drifted from him, now having an affair with his "friend" Bud.Jonas sets aside his fears when entrepreneur Masao Tanaka approaches him about descending to the depths of the Challenger Deep one more time in order to find out what's been causing high-tech earthquake detecting equipment to malfunction. Jonas and Tanaka's son DJ descend to the deepest part of the ocean when all of Jonas's worst fears materialize in the form of a hungry megalodon. Jonas barely makes it back to the surface, but he soon learns a pregnant female meg came out of the depths as well. Whales are beaching themselves all over the South Pacific, and when the shark turns to human prey, the US Navy decides to send a submarine after her. Masao Tanaka and Jonas Taylor have a better idea: capture the shark and keep her in captivity at Tanaka's lagoon near Monterey. Between the navy, Greenpeace, gawkers, the media, and Jonas Taylor's gang, just about everybody is following the meg as she eats her way across the Pacific. Naturally, capturing a 60-foot predator with 7-inch serrated teeth is no easy task, and lots of people get eaten up until the final showdown between Jonas and the shark.Alten's characters are pretty one-dimensional, and I wouldn't exactly call Jonas an alpha male, but this book isn't about characters. It's about a 60-foot, pure white prehistoric eating machine that raises havoc and devours lots of people. If there's a character you don't like, don't worry, they'll likely wind up as fish food. Some adventure writers today are trying this format of lots of action and sparse character development, but nobody pulls it off with Alten's finesse. He's written one heck of a lean monster book that kept me turning the pages and wouldn't let me put it down. The best thing of all is that this is just the first book in a trilogy, and the other two are just as good. Steve Alten knows how to write a darned good monster book.