Imagine a shark that weighs over 45 tons. Imagine a shark that was over 80 feet long. Imagine a shark with razor sharp 8 inch teeth. Now imagine if that shark was alive and swimming earth’s oceans today. Oh yeah, imagine it was really hungry.

Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror is the first book by author Steve Alten and if you haven’t guessed, it deals with a huge shark. Not just an imaginary shark, but an actual shark that may have existed up until 100,000 years ago. The forerunner of the great white shark Carcharodon Megalodon, or Meg if it’s easier to say.

Meg follows the story of Jonas Taylor, a deep sea submersible pilot who has a close encounter with something unimaginable on a routine mission.

Years later, in one of the deepest ocean trenches in the earth’s crust, Jonas once again comes face to face with the creature that has been plaguing his dreams the last few years. Unfortunately for him and many others, it is a creature of pure nightmare.

If your like me and are a huge shark buff and a fan of Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws, then Meg is a must read. The book is chock full of shark facts, boat smashing and most importantly: people munching, which to me is what I’m looking for in a book about a giant prehistoric shark.

You can tell that Alten has done his homework on the Megalodon as each page and aspect of the story is rooted in believable occurrences, the best being how the thought to be extinct Meg has survived the last few centuries or so. I loved this aspect of the book and the opening chapter which describes how the Meg may have fed on dinosaurs at one time, was a great piece of bait to dangle in front of a reader to get them to take a bite!

What flaws the book is that you can tell it is Alten’s first, only a few characters get deep development and you can pretty much guess what is going to happen on the next page, but it’s all good and fairly entertaining. I enjoyed the 300 page book quite thoroughly until the ending however, and this is where the fact and fiction run afoul of one another in a truly unbelievable and quite frankly horrible way. Although I did like the book, the final confrontation nearly made me hate it, it’s terrible and in no way on par with the rest of the story in any fashion.

Meg is set to be a feature film in 2007 and has Jan DeBont attached to direct, so I’m glad I read the novel first, I just hope they change the ending a bit from that of the book. But still if you’re a giant shark fan then Meg will surely satisfy.

6 of 10.

I actually read this book several years ago. I didn't know it was being made into a movie; I didn't even know anybody else had read it. I still have it somewhere.

The characters were narrow and one-dimensional (read LAME). But the story was well-paced and a fast read. It was also somewhat predictable, and the ending did suck intensely, but it had some cool moments where in the movie in my head I was saying, "Don't go towards the light. It's day-glo Jaws."

It's a promising movie premise, though, and the book was well-researched. I'd never heard of a megalodon before reading it.

4 out of 10 doomed sea researchers