Megalodon Rising: The Origins of the Prehistoric Shark Novel

For all intents and purposes, the origins of megalodon fiction can be traced to a particularly influential passage in Jaws. After catching sight of the titular great white shark for the first time, marine biologist Matt Hooper starts speculating about the existence of even larger monsters lurking in the depths of the ocean:

We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They’re six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. . . . What’s to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? Not lack of food. If there’s enough down there to support whales, there’s enough to support sharks that big. Just because we’ve never seen a hundred-foot great white doesn’t mean they couldn’t exist.8

Although Hooper never again mentions megalodons—largely because his companions dismiss his ideas as the ravings of an impractical intellectual with an overactive imagination—this passage inspired numerous subsequent authors, who recognized the potential appeal of stories about prehistoric sharks and produced novels about them. Some of the first of these texts include Robin Brown’s Megalodon (1981), George Edward Noe’s Carcharodon (1987), Tom Dade’s Quest for Megalodon (1993), Steve Alten’s Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror (1997), and Charles Wilson’s Extinct (1997). Later examples include Jonathan Rand’s Mississippi Megalodon (2008) as well as Alten’s six subsequent shark novels and myriad books issued by Severed Press, a small Australian publisher specializing primarily in horror fiction.9

Generically speaking, megalodon novels are difficult to categorize, for they contain elements of action adventure, science fiction, animal horror, and nautical literature. Drawing on Emily Alder’s scholarship on maritime writing, I would emphasize that they also possess gothic qualities. In her essay “Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic,” Alder observes that literary critics have largely ignored the gothic aspects of seafaring texts despite the fact that

ships can be isolating, claustrophobic structures; ocean depths conceal monsters, secrets, bodies; the sea and its weather provide storms, sunsets, and remote locales for sublime and terrifying experiences; deep water is a useful metaphor for the interiority of the self; the ocean’s precarious surface interfaces between life and death, chaos and order, self and other.10

Though incomplete, this list of maritime gothic tropes—many of which appear in megalodon fiction—provides ample evidence for Alder’s claim that sea writing offers important “opportunities for rethinking or extending the scope of the Gothic in literary culture.”11

While megalodon novels often involve isolated men trapped aboard claustrophobic ships or stuffed into cramped submersibles, I am more interested in some of their other gothic elements, such as their representations of monstrous sharks and their treatment of marine science. Importantly, many literary and cultural critics highlight the subversive potential of monsters. For example, in her essay “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” Donna Haraway situates herself in the “womb of a pregnant monster” in an attempt to “find another relationship to nature besides reification and possession.”12 And in “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen posits that monsters “ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our toleration toward its expression.”13 Megalodon novels make no attempt to appropriate sharks for progressive social or environmental purposes, however. They use them as a foil to showcase the extraordinary physical and intellectual abilities of those humans—white American men—capable of subduing or slaughtering the largest oceanic predators the planet has to offer. In so doing, these novels exploit megalodon monstrosity to reinforce long-standing Western ideas about humanity’s capacity to exert dominance over the natural world.

Scientifically speaking, paleontologists know very little about the actual megalodons that populated the seas of the Miocene and Pliocene epochs, because, like other elasmobranches, their skeletons consisted primarily of cartilage, not calcium. As a result, they did not leave behind many fossils, just a few scattered teeth, coprolites, and vertebrae.14 Scientists who have studied these remains estimate that female megalodons ranged somewhere between forty-four and fifty-six feet long, and their smaller male counterparts ranged somewhere between thirty-four and forty-seven feet long. Insofar as their physical appearance is concerned, experts suggest that megalodons possessed gaping jaws, replaceable teeth, and “streamlined yet powerful bodies built to efficiently cut through the water,” much like their present-day analogues, the great white sharks and the mako sharks.15

Perhaps not surprisingly, authors of megalodon novels often play fast and loose with established science, exaggerating the size and appearance of the sharks to make them more formidable and monstrous. Thus the female shark in Megalodon: Apex Predator measures seventy-five feet long, while the male shark in Carcharodon measures eighty feet long. In Extinct, Wilson describes five megalodons: two sizable pups that are twenty-five feet long, one massive adolescent that is fifty feet long, and two titanic adults that are two hundred feet long.16

Taking advantage of the fear factor established by Jaws, some authors—Noe and Wilson among them—depict megalodons as morphologically similar to great white sharks. Others describe them in far more unsettling terms. In Deep Terror, Alten explains that megalodons adapted to their deep-sea environment by changing their skin color to an eerie, bioluminescent white.17 In Quest for Megalodon, Dade describes the sharks as possessing “leprous and rotted” skin, as well as “a mass of dangling feelers” not unlike “catfish barbells.”18 And in Megalodon, Brown maintains that the prehistoric sharks living in the Molokai Fracture “did not look like sharks at all,” because they evolved gigantic heads and teeth and camouflaged themselves “snout to tail, with a layer of living and dead mollusks.”19 Note that in these novels, evolution is both the mechanism that enables the sharks to survive across time and the source of their monstrosity.

Though their appearance differs from book to book, megalodon character traits and behavior patterns do not. All the novels depict these elasmobranches as monstrous predators and insatiable eating machines, incessantly prowling the ocean in search of human and nonhuman prey. Like many authors, Noe amplifies the horror by adopting Peter Benchley’s strategy of writing from the cold-blooded fish’s point of view. At the beginning of Carcharodon, he explains that the megalodon “was so large that he could eat hundreds of pounds of flesh and still hunt again the same day. No shark had ever been as ravenous as this one. He was well equipped for killing; his razor-sharp, serrated teeth were as large as a grown man’s hand.”20 Then, he proceeds to describe, in quick succession and brutal detail, the manner in which the shark locates, slaughters, and devours its food:

The shark descended and searched the ocean for anything worth eating. He saw a manta ray and he ripped off one of its six-foot wings with one quick bite, turned and snapped the other wing off. The manta’s lacerated muscles quivered and bled profusely from the stumps, where his magnificent wings had once received their power. As the manta’s wingless body settled on the ocean floor, Carcharodon turned once more and scooped up the remaining five hundred pounds of the ray and swallowed it easily. The shark continued to hunt.21

As he concludes these paragraphs, Noe foreshadows the death and destruction that occurs later in the novel, noting how “he was never satisfied, he always hungered and he always stalked.”22

If megalodon eating habits are monstrous, then so are their reproductive behaviors and pup-rearing strategies. Megalodon features two adult sharks that devour the carcass of their progeny after he is killed by humans, and Quest for Megalodon features a female fish that gives birth to two live offspring, the survivors of an intense in utero cannibalism competition. In Megalodon: Apex Predator, an angry mother shark destroys an aquatic Antarctic research station when she attempts to free two of her drugged, captive offspring from their tanks. And in Megalodon: Feeding Frenzy, a pregnant, cannibalistic female megalodon leaves her secret underwater cavern in search of food and returns to give birth to hundreds of live young.23 In these novels, characterizing the sharks as violent cannibals who cannot control their ravenous appetites serves to heighten their monstrosity.

Another prominent gothic element in megalodon novels is a pronounced preoccupation with science. According to Fred Botting, the figure of the scientist—especially the mad scientist—looms large in gothic writing because “the boundaries crossed by science transform the understanding of humanity’s place in the natural world,” often in terrifying ways.24 Megalodon novels are not cautionary tales about the limits of science, like Frankenstein (1823), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Jurassic Park (1990). Rather, they are science-as-savior books that revolve around the exploits of highly intelligent, hypermasculine scientists, determined to rescue the world from the onslaught of gigantic prehistoric sharks. Frank Acreman, the hero of Megalodon, is a marine biologist, and so is Scott Thompson, the hero of Quest for Megalodon. Meanwhile, Professor Benson, the protagonist of Carcharodon, is an oceanographer, and Jonas Taylor, the protagonist of Deep Terror, is a paleontologist. All of these men are athletic and attractive; all are convinced of the extant status of megalodons; and all are determined to vanquish them, no matter what the public or private cost. As Benson puts it, “the beast must be destroyed because it has no place in our world.”25

To augment the heroic stature of their protagonists—and to make their claims about prehistoric sharks more convincing—these novels gothicize the ocean as an unfathomable realm of mystery, capable of concealing all manner of strange creatures in its dark, watery depths. They also employ what ecocritic David Ingram calls a “rhetoric of ‘scientific’ plausibility,” citing the relatively recent discovery of new deepwater species or those long thought to be extinct.26 Sometimes they move rapidly back and forth between these two forms of discourse. In one of his lectures to his students, Scott Thompson remarks, “The world’s oceans remain virtually inaccessible, unexplored by humankind. Water covers 75 percent of our planet. With depths of seven miles, we can only guess at the secrets awaiting discovery.” After exciting the interest of his pupils, he reveals that the sea contains several extant species that scientists once regarded as extinct:

A prime example is the coelacanth, a strange metallic-blue fish over six feet long which was classified as having been extinct for seventy million years. A living specimen was taken by fishermen in the Indian Ocean in 1938. . . . Another, even more recent case is megamouth, a species of shark similar to a whale shark that has no teeth and feeds on plankton by seining water through its oversized mouth. A fourteen footer was caught several years ago in the deep Pacific near Hawaii. Two other specimens have been encountered since.

As he concludes, Thompson returns to the gothic mode and indulges in a wildly speculative monster fantasy, exclaiming, “Other creatures must exist, incomprehensible in size and adaptability, which we have not met since our ability to penetrate their aqueous world is somewhat limited.”27

For Thompson and the other scientists in contemporary megalodon novels, proving the existence of the sharks is not enough. These men also feel compelled to explain how these fish survived across time and why they left their secret hideaways. Most of them elaborate theories similar to that outlined by Frank Acreman:

Millions of years had committed the Megalodons to the deep Fracture. Once the seas had teemed with predators and only the development of massive cartilage and muscle had kept the Megalodons ahead, and even then it had been a closely run race. The fast-swimming sea lizard, Icthyosaur, with its saw-blade snout, had savaged the Megalodon ancestors of the remote past. With their better swim bladders and delicate fin structure, the Megalodons had evaded this assault by living ever deeper.

This special niche of dominance had been obtained at a price. Very little food existed naturally and like that much smaller species of the deep, Argyropelecus, the hatchet fish, the Megalodons had been forced to enlarge their mouths and their teeth.28

This passage and those appearing elsewhere in megalodon fiction ignore the fact that few, if any, organisms can move back and forth between the ocean’s epipelagic and hadalpelagic zones because of the extreme light, temperature, and pressure differences.29 Instead, they employ plausible scientific rhetoric to advance an unrealistic vision of the evolutionary process in which a threatened species saves itself simply by relocating to an alternate habitat and rapidly adapting to it.

As I observed earlier, these scientists also reveal the sharks’ reasons for coming into contact with humans, most of which have to do with intrusive anthropogenic activities. In Megalodon, a submarine searching for gold in the Molokai Fracture provokes the sharks into an attack; in Extinct, nuclear testing forces the megalodons from their deepwater home; in Quest for Megalodon, noise pollution irritates the sharks into rising from the depths; and in Megalodon: Feeding Frenzy, an oil rig in the Chukchi Sea releases the megalodons when it accidentally drills into an undersea cavern. Once they surface, the sharks run amok, creating even more problems in oceanic ecosystems already stressed by overfishing, pollution, and climate change.

If humans and their exploitative environmental activities release megalodons into the known world, then humans also put them back where they belong, either by killing them or forcing them to return to the deep-sea trenches from which they came. At the end of Megalodon, a Russian submarine torpedoes one shark, while the other two sharks retreat to safer waters. Characters in Megalodon: Feeding Frenzy and Megalodon: Apex Predator kill the prehistoric fishes using rocket launders and nuclear bombs, respectively. In Carcharodon, Professor Benson and his protégé Marc destroy the shark with an explosive harpoon intended for whale hunting, and in Extinct, scientist Alan Freeman blasts one of the smaller megalodons with dynamite and drives the remaining four sharks out to sea.30 In the end, then, these novels reinforce the reactionary idea that humans—especially white American men with access to high-tech weaponry developed by the military–industrial complex—possess mastery over nature.

Megalodon Evolving: Steve Alten’s The Meg and Its Sequels

No prehistoric shark novels are more popular with reading audiences—and none are more invested in exploiting megalodon monstrosity and promoting human exceptionalism—than those written by Steve Alten.31 For these reasons, they are particularly important to scrutinize. As the series begins in Deep Terror, navy-diver-turned-paleontologist Jonas Taylor discovers two megalodons, a male and a pregnant female, when he descends into the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench in a small submersible. The male dies after accidentally ensnaring himself in an undersea cable, and Jonas’s crew members try to tow him up to their ship. Attracted by the smell of blood in the water, the female follows the carcass of her mate to the surface, penetrating through the thermocline that had trapped both fish in the depths of the trench. Ravenous with hunger, she proceeds to wreak havoc throughout the Pacific, pausing only to give birth to three offspring, one of which she cannibalizes and one of which dies in an orca attack. Eventually, she is killed by Jonas, who captures the surviving pup and places it in a special exhibit in an aquatic theme park at the Tanaka Institute in Monterey, California.

Alten’s subsequent novels represent increasingly outlandish variations on these events. In The Trench, the captive female megalodon—now named Angel—goes into estrus and escapes from her tank at the institute into the open ocean. Driven by her reproductive instincts, she travels back to the trench, where she encounters a male of her species, mates with him, kills him, and bears him two pups. Primal Waters recapitulates this plotline in reverse, as Angel again goes into estrus and leaves the depths, accompanied by her two male offspring. Just before she arrives back at the institute, where she is recaptured by Jonas, she copulates with and kills one of her progeny. In Hell’s Aquarium, Alten’s characters engage with a new set of concerns. At the beginning of the novel, scientists at the institute perform DNA tests on Angel and her five pups—Belle, Lizzy, Angelica, Mary Kate, and Ashley—and discover that they possess the ability to reproduce through parthenogenesis. Although Angel and her weaker progeny perish, Belle and Lizzy escape the institute and claim the Strait of San Juan de Fuca as a nursery for their future, fatherless offspring. And in Nightstalkers, Belle and Lizzy leave their pups in the Salish Sea to travel back to the institute, where they are killed by a captive liopleurodon, a gigantic, prehistoric aquatic reptile taken from the Panthalassa Sea. Toward the end of the book, Jonas’s son David makes plans to capture the remaining sharks for the new owner of the institute, who wants to put them back on public display.

At first glance, Alten’s novels seem to indulge the fantasy—especially comforting in the age of the Sixth Extinction—that some extinct species are actually extant. I would argue, though, that the soothing aspects of this fantasy are mediated by the fact that the books contain several troubling contradictions. First, they represent megalodons as brutal apex predators, boundary-crossing monsters who are incapable of coexisting with humans; thus they indicate that these fish belong in the past, not the present. To further underscore this point, they anthropomorphize the conflicts between humans and sharks as stereotypical battles of the sexes in which male scientists use incredible amounts of violence to subdue or destroy female sharks. Second, Alten employs seemingly plausible scientific rhetoric to describe these fish as capable of responding to extinction threats by swiftly evolving new survival abilities, such as parthenogenetic reproduction. In this view, species naturally possess the intelligence, consciousness, and agency they need to take care of themselves (unless they are confronted directly by humans seeking to eradicate them). Like most other megalodon novels, then, Alten’s books promote dangerously misinformed views of human exceptionalism, evolutionary processes, and the ecological problems of the Anthropocene.

With respect to their monstrosity, Alten’s prehistoric elasmobranches embody many of the characteristics that Jeffrey Jerome Cohen outlines in “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” According to Cohen, monsters “refuse easy categorization” and cause “scientific inquiry and its ordered relationality to crumble.”32 As long-lost relics of another era, Alten’s megalodons transgress the boundary between extant and extinct species, thereby flouting the natural process of the evolution of life on earth, which requires the extinction of some species to make way for the evolution of new ones. As soon as they surface in the twentieth century, they throw marine food chains and ecosystems into complete chaos, and they baffle scientists, who argue among themselves about whether to classify the sharks as endangered or invasive, as amoral or evil, as natural or supernatural.33

Importantly, Alten’s monstrous megalodons also possess bizarre physical characteristics—their ghostly skin, tremendous size, and eerie bioluminescence—that serve to differentiate them from other known shark species. When Jonas first sees the male at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, he is shocked by its outward appearance: “the conical snout, the thick triangular head, the crescent-moon tail. He estimated the Megalodon to be a good forty-five feet long, 30,000 pounds. Pure white. Florescent, just like the giant clams, just like the tubeworms.”34 Here the shark’s similarity to strange, deep-sea mollusks and annelids—as opposed to other elasmobranches—makes it particularly disturbing. Elsewhere, Alten emphasizes the horrifying aspects of the sharks by describing the megalodons according to a set of stock metaphors, most of which he elaborates in Deep Terror. Thus he refers to them both in supernatural terms as ghosts and devils and in mechanistic terms as rockets, torpedoes, missiles, and trains. In later volumes, he also relies on monarchical language, demon imagery, and animal similes, comparing sharks to pit bulls, wolves, and tigers.35

All of this figurative language clearly demonstrates—to borrow a phrase from Cohen—that monstrous megalodons “dwell at the gates of difference” as an absolutely horrifying nonhuman other.36 I would emphasize, though, that their strange physical appearance is not their only repugnant aspect, for they routinely practice behaviors that transgress the norms accepted by most human societies, including incest, infanticide, and cannibalism. Shortly after seeing the megalodons for the first time, Jonas witnesses the female devouring the carcass of her mate, “her snout buried deep within the male’s bleeding body, her swollen white belly quivering in spasms as she engulfed huge chunks of flesh and entrails.”37 She later gives birth to three pups and eats one of them.38

As Cohen emphasizes, “representing an anterior culture” or, I would add, a nonhuman animal species “as monstrous justifies its displacement or extermination.”39 By constantly othering the female megalodon in Deep Terror, Alten makes Jonas’s extreme violence against her—he steers his submersible into her stomach and cuts out her heart from the inside—seem both necessary and heroic. For contrast, consider the difference between this representational strategy and that employed by Jonathan Balcombe in his book What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (2016). Throughout, Balcombe describes recent scientific discoveries about piscine sentience in an effort to encourage readers to identify with fish and “cultivate a new relationship with them,” one that involves less thoughtlessness and more mindfulness, less exploitation and more conservation.40

Not insignificantly, Alten’s megalodon novels also serve to reinforce the masculinist monster myth that Val Plumwood discusses in “Being Prey.” Describing the aftermath of the crocodile attack that nearly took her life, Plumwood explains, “As a story that evoked the monster myth, mine was especially subject to masculinist appropriation. The imposition of the master narrative appeared in a number of different forms: in the exaggeration of the crocodile’s size, in the portrayal of the encounter as a heroic wrestling match, and especially in its sexualization.”41 In Deep Terror, Jonas’s story, too, evokes this myth, especially insofar as it represents him enmeshed in a biblical struggle of epic proportions against the inner anatomy of a giant female shark. Ironically, his only weapon consists of an improvised knife made from a fossilized megalodon tooth:

Jonas Taylor could not maintain a grip on the slippery cords. From the angle of the cardiac chamber, he realized the Meg was rising, probably to attack. He thought of Terry. Wrapping the crook of his left arm around the bundle of cords, he braced his bare feet against the soft tissues of the inner chamber walls above him and, inverted, pulled the beating muscle downward with all his might. His right hand tightened his grip on the tooth. With one powerful slash, he cut into the cords.42

True to form, this confrontation results in the demise of the shark, as man proves himself superior to monstrous nature. Here, as elsewhere in Alten’s books, the gender of the shark—and the extreme violence involved in destroying it—lends an uncomfortably misogynist tone to the encounter.

Although these novels tend to demonstrate the impossibility of the coexistence of humans and megalodons, they express at least some concern about the fish and their potential extinction. In Deep Terror, a federal judge lists megalodons “as a protected species of the Monterey Bay Sanctuary,” and in Nightstalkers, an environmentalist wonders whether preserving endangered orcas should take precedence over preserving endangered sharks.43 Meanwhile, in Hell’s Aquarium, RAW, an animal rights organization concerned for the health and well-being of the captive elasmobranches, insists that the Tanaka Institute release them into the wild. Of note, the books ultimately adopt a reactionary attitude toward these individuals and organizations, criticizing the measures they take to ensure the preservation of the prehistoric sharks as insensitive, selfish, and harmful. Thus Jonas’s friend Mac proves that some whale scientists care more for cetaceans than they do humans, and Jonas’s wife, Terry, exposes RAW as an “extremist group” whose “leaders espouse animal rights only as an excuse to draw public attention and monetary contributions.”44

According to the novels, the sharks might not be able to rely on marine scientists or environmental activists for protection, but they can rescue themselves from adverse circumstances through evolutionary adaptation. Crucially, they employ a rhetoric of scientific plausibility that draws on recent discoveries about shark reproductive behavior to do so. In Hell’s Aquarium, Jonas’s researchers inform him that their captive female megalodon gave birth to three genetically identical offspring, conceived through a parthenogenetic process similar to that observed in hammerhead and blacktip reef sharks. After some pointed discourse on the efficiency of this mode of reproduction and the irrelevancy of male organisms, Jonas’s scientists posit that “man has been decimating the ocean’s shark populations . . . perhaps nature found a way to counteract some of the effects.”45 They conclude that “with their numbers dwindling close to extinction, it makes perfect sense that Megalodons would eventually evolve to sex free reproduction.”46

What makes these sections of the novels plausible is the fact that they draw on recent scientific discoveries. Some animals—including several species of insect, amphibian, reptile, and fish—possess the ability to reproduce through parthenogenesis. Some of them can even shift back and forth between sexual and asexual modes of reproduction, depending on environmental circumstances.47 The problem in the novels lies in the fact that Alten uses these scientific details to support the reactionary idea that humans need not worry about endangered species because they possess the means to save themselves from eradication. In so doing, Alten misrepresents the precarity of those species not already endowed with special capacities, those species that must rely on the slow mechanisms of evolution to adapt to their changing circumstances. Along the way, he also perpetuates masculinist monster myths that endorse outdated ideas about human exceptionalism.

In the end, then, Alten’s megalodon novels—just like their numerous predecessors and successors—showcase the various ways in which certain gothic tropes can be appropriated for antienvironmentalist purposes. Ironically, in a few rare moments, these books gesture toward the potential of sea monsters to inspire more progressive ideas. Toward the end of Nightstalkers, Jonas and Zach, a Scottish cryptid hunter, travel to Antarctica, where they discover a prehistoric sperm whale from the Miocene epoch. Determined to slaughter the animal, Jonas aims the submersible’s laser weaponry at the cetacean, but Zach stops him with some stirring words:

Seeing what ye were about tae do, I realized that we’re supposed tae be better than this . . . not jist me and ye, but mankind . . . humanity. It’s a lesson I had learned before but forgot until this very moment; that at the end of the day our survival as a species may jist come down tae whether or not we respect the rights of other species tae live. God, listen tae me, I sound like a bloody Disney character.48

Although Jonas allows the whale to live, he shows no evidence that his attitude toward and relationship with the natural world have changed, and neither does anyone else in the novel. At the conclusion of the book, Jonas’s son David kills a rampaging female liopleurodon in spectacularly violent fashion and sets out to capture Belle’s and Lizzy’s pups from their nursery in the Salish Sea. As these events indicate, none of Zach’s enlightened ideas about the peaceful coexistence of human and nonhuman animals were meant to be taken seriously.

Notes

1. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (New York: Penguin, 2016), 11, 22–31; Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2.

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2. Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 208.

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3. Rebecca Evans, “Fantastic Futures? Cli-Fi, Climate Justice, and Queer Futurity,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 4, no. 2–3 (2017): 106–7.

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4. Evans, 107.

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5. Throughout, I use the term human with the recognition that some humans—those who live in the industrialized nations of the Global North—are far more responsible for anthropogenic climate change than others. Likewise, I use the term Anthropocence with the recognition that it obscures the capitalist and colonialist forces that have contributed to the current precarity of the planet.

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6. Sharks, rays, and various other cartilaginous fish belong to the subclass elasmobranchii.

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7. University of California Museum of Paleontology, “Misconceptions about Evolution,” 2012, https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq.php.

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8. Peter Benchley, Jaws (New York: Random House, 1974), 229–30.

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9. Steve Alten’s series includes Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror (New York: Bantam, 1997), The Trench (New York: Pinnacle, 1999), Meg: Primal Waters (New York: Forge, 2004), Meg: Hell’s Aquarium (New York: Tor, 2019), Meg: Origins (Portland, Oreg.: Gere Donovan Press, 2011), Meg: Nightstalkers (New York: Tor, 2016), and Meg: Generations (New York: Forge, 2018). Some of Severed Press’s megalodon offerings include Jake Bible’s Mega (2014), Eric S. Brown’s Megalodon Apocalypse (2015), Matthew Dennion’s Operation Megalodon (2018), J. E. Gurley’s Megalodon: Feeding Frenzy (2016), S. J. Larsson’s Megalodon: Apex Predator (2016), Flash Rex’s Megalodon Lives (2011), and Viktor Zarkov’s Megatooth: A Deep Sea Thriller (2015).

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10. Emily Alder, “Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic,” Gothic Studies 19, no. 2 (2017): 1.

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11. Alder.

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12. Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 295–96.

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13. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 20.

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14. Coprolite is the scientific term for a specimen of fossilized feces.

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15. Danielle Hall, “The Megalodon,” Smithsonian, February 2019, https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/sharks-rays/megalodon.

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16. Gurley, Feeding Frenzy, 81; George Edward Noe, Carcharodon (New York: Vantage, 1987), 118; Charles Wilson, Extinct (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 309.

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17. Alten, Deep Terror, 103.

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18. Tom Dade, Quest for Megalodon (New York: Swan, 1993), 103.

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19. Robin Brown, Megalodon (New York: Playboy Paperbacks, 1981), 65, 97.

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20. Noe, Carcharodon, 2.

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21. Noe, 5.

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22. Noe, 6.

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23. Brown, Megalodon, 221–22; Dade, Quest for Megalodon, 20–21, 222–23; Wilson, Extinct, 307–10; Larsson, Apex Predator, 78–87; Gurley, Megalodon, 170–90.

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24. Fred Botting, Gothic, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2014), 13.

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25. Brown, Megalodon, 12; Dade, Quest for Megalodon, 18; Noe, Carcharodon, 88, 90; Alten, Deep Terror, 6.

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26. David Ingram, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (Exeter, U.K.: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 7.

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27. Dade, Quest for Megalodon, 18–19.

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28. Brown, Megalodon, 65.

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29. Epipelagic refers to surface waters, and hadalpelagic refers to oceanic trench waters. See National Weather Service, “Layers of the Ocean,” https://www.weather.gov/jetstream/layers_ocean.

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30. Brown, Megalodon, 221–24; Gurley, Megalodon, 123–24; Larsson, Megalodon, 185–86; Noe, Carcharodon, 193; Wilson, Extinct, 230, 309.

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31. According to Alten’s website, Deep Terror “hit every major best-seller list, including #19 on the New York Times list (#7 audio).” Many of his subsequent novels also achieved best-seller status. The film version of Deep Terror, released in August 2018 as The Meg, earned more than $530 million at the box office. See https://www.stevealten.com/bio/; Mark Hughes, “‘Aquaman’ Tops ‘The Dark Knight’ with $1 Billion Box Office,” Forbes, January 13, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2019/01/13/aquaman-tops-the-dark-knight-with-1-billion-box-office.

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32. Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 6–7.

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33. Alten, Nightstalkers, 58–59, 284–86.

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34. Alten, Deep Terror, 103.

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35. Alten, 104, 129, 147, 162, 166, 167, 198, 239; Alten, The Trench, 15; Alten, Primal Waters, 56, 85; Alten, Nightstalkers, 36, 217.

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36. Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 7.

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37. Alten, Deep Terror, 112.

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38. Alten, 221.

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39. Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 7–8.

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40. Jonathan Balcombe, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (New York: Scientific American, 2016), 8, 22.

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41. Val Plumwood, “Being Prey,” in The New Earth Reader, ed. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 86.

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42. Alten, Deep Terror, 322.

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43. Alten, 244; Alten, Nightstalkers, 59, 285.

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44. Alten, Hell’s Aquarium, 92–93, 361.

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45. Alten, 181.

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46. Alten, 183.

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47. Melissa Hogenboom, “Spectacular Real Virgin Births,” BBC Earth, December 22, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141219-spectacular-real-virgin-births.

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48. Alten, Nightstalkers, 363.

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