Note: Since I feared that the absence of a lousy killer shark movie in this month’s Video Cheese issue might trigger severe symptoms of physical withdrawal amongst our readers, I decided to review a bad killer shark novel.
Should Jabootu’s Bad Literature Dimension be explored further? Only YOU can decide.
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Megalodon by Robin Brown (1981)
Wow, this dude is a bad writer. (I know, rocks and glass houses.) I don’t mean his plot construction or characterization or any of that more advanced stuff. I mean the way he puts words together. Here follow some examples taken only from the novel’s first few pages. The setting is a submarine sitting on a conveniently small underwater ledge above a deep-ocean trench. “The slightest vibration could nudge us off of here!” one character helpfully declaims. Three guesses where this is going.
- “Tessler considered himself some inches too tall for the submarine service and he had a love of running that was out of context.”
- “[The submarine] squatted like a huge matte-black sea cucumber on a ledge of rock just wide enough for her considerable girth.”
- “Its tensions, the demands for fast, complex decisions and the admittedly masochistic thrill of commanding the most sophisticated and lethal weapon ever built by man, were the stimulants of his metabolism.”
- “An electronic gong sounded once. Tessler turned accurately towards the sound.”
- “Ten seconds passed, slow as drops of lead falling from a heated cauldron.”
Wow. And there’s a lot more where that came from. Sadly, as we’ll discuss later, I can’t with total confidence dub Brown the worst author to write novels about Megalodon sharks. He’s certainly in contention for the crown, but no shoe-in by any means. Perhaps I’ll explore his competition at greater length in the months ahead.
Anyhoo, the sub is sitting precariously upon the ledge because it lies over a deep ocean trench that contains a superfantiscifavulicious ore field. How they think they’re going to get to this ore isn’t worth getting into. In any case, as you may have figured out by now, there’s something more ominous than ore down at the remote bottom of that trench. And I’m not talking about boredom…wait, yes, actually, I am.
Quite quickly the title beastie—although kept off-camera, as it were, for the moment—comes up for a looksie and sends the ballistic missile submarine USS Jules Verne (!) down to Davy Jones’ Locker. Or so I assume, although later the damaged sub has been mysteriously retrieved in some fashion (from a deep-ocean trench that no submarine could enter?), and we never really learn what happened to the crew.
Unaware of what attacked the boat, the government calls on the services of scientists Frank Acreman and Barbara Monday, as well as their picaresque boss Harry Asquith. Acreman’s research has developed a mechanism allowing humans to communicate with dolphins. (!!) This should also work on whales, Acreman insists, as they are basically “big dolphins.” (!!!)*
[Carl Fink clarifies: “Dolphins are a type of whale. Saying that whales are basically big dolphins is weird, like saying “canines are basically big jackals”, but it isn’t actually that far off. Orcas, now, are in fact a type of big dolphin.” Given that, I can only accept Mr. Brown’s claims as to the sea mammals’ mental superiority to man, as the awesome brain power of the Orca has already been established by other highly respected scientists.]I guess one strategy for making the sudden reappearance of the Carchardon Megalodon seem more reasonable is to include an even more outrÈ plot device to contrast the notion with. Talking ala Dr. Doolittle with dolphins, who prove to be the full intellectual equal (at least) of humans, certainly serves.
The dolphins’ unique skills and higher intelligence will prove invaluable in solving the mystery of the downed sub. Acreman explains the rationale behind his research: “[Doris the Dolphin] could tell you [the presumed enemy ship’s] exact size to within one-millionth of an inch. She could tell you how fast it was moving through the water. And reading variations of sonar echoes one-thirtieth of a second apart, she could tell you what kind of metal the object was made of, and whether it was hollow or solid, or both.*”
However, we’re presumably all here—by which I mean the several dozen people who may have read the book over the years—for the giant shark. Megalodon’s example of the breed is the largest found in any of the various such novels I’ve read, a somewhat excessive-seeming 100 feet in length. This puts it half-over large again as most of its peers, as Mr. Brown’s novelist competitors deemed a sixty to seventy foot monster well large enough.
The book’s human characters, meanwhile, are right out of the Pulp Writer’s Handbook. Acreman is the stalwart Man of Science, all too aware of Man’s Unwarranted Arrogance. “He had his own considerable reservations about man’s inexorable inquisitiveness,” we’re told. Then there’s Barbara, Acreman’s girlfriend/colleague, and Asquith their boss, who inevitably proves a little too concerned about the old filthy lucre. The military and gov’ment spOOk types, of course, range from the outright villainous to, at best, being merely stupid, small-minded jerks.
The author’s hilariously misanthropic ‘green’ politics—the frowning designation of ‘naked ape’ is used to describe us humans more than once, and Brown rhapsodizes on the myriad ways in which dolphins and whales are better, smarter and more moral than us (for instance, they apparently don’t write books like this one, much less expect others of their kind to pay to read them)—require Man to be the problem, rather than the big sharks.
Thus, rather than having the sharks invade our territory, we invade theirs. And so the U.S. Navy continues to send down one Ohio-class nuclear submarine after another, despite the mysterious accidents which continue to afflict them. (It must be a hell of an ore field to justify the loss of a series of advanced submarines and their highly trained crews.) This scenario also conveniently allows for some purely environmental danger to the craft. Even when the subs are resting upon the aforementioned ledge, they’re down past their normal depth limits and thus quite vulnerable.
Acreman and his team capture (following much ethical hand-wringing) a sperm whale. This being can go deep enough to investigate the trench and investigate what’s causing the mishaps. Transporting the beast to the locale of the trench involves the use of a dirigible, the only craft capable of ferrying the massive creature. As you’d guess from this description, the action here grows increasingly outrÈ and cartoonish. More so, I mean, than you’d expect from a giant prehistoric shark novel.
In the end, the bad humans reap their inevitable rewards, and we are threatened with the possibility of a sequel. However, it would take another author entirely to turn out an actual series of bad prehistoric shark novels.
From the Pen of the Bard:
- “The wind was blowing like a knife.”
The following excerpts are taken from a sex scene:
- “The shower compartment was tiny, too small for the two of them…the hot water welding their bodies together in a pastiche of the heat of love.”
- “Acreman, normally a concerned, gentle lover, fell on her with avid aggression…
- “When he came, it was like an explosion, too quick for love, too individual for any bond…she gripped him tightly and used him cleverly to build her own, different, orgasm…”
- “…[afterward] she lay in the moving darkness wondering how she, who had never dared approach the phenomenon before, would cope with this thing that others had described as love.”
Plot Points:
- Mention of the coelacanth? Yes.
- Things I Learned. Dolphins don’t have any concept of fear. Since they never developed man’s violent tendencies*—oh, woe is Man–they’ve never needed it. Apparently the ocean’s are completely sans dangers for the Noble Porpoise.
- Things I Learned: It’s a general characteristic of sea creatures that they have race memories.
- Things I Learned: Dolphins early on made a conscious, informed decision to live in the sea, which has served to keep them saner than Man. Really: “Acreman considered this the result of their making the right choice at the start of their evolutionary history. They decided to live in the sea.”
For the record, I tried to make this piece longer. However, nearly every individual scene in the book was so tedious (and this in a book just over a scant 200 pages) that frankly I couldn’t force myself to continue.
