Nightstalkers
by
Steve Alten
Tor,
367 pages
Review
by Pat Black
“Esteban!
Esteban!”
When
I was much younger, I stayed with an uncle who is, by anyone’s estimation, an
accomplished, clever and well-read person. I returned to his house one
afternoon with a bag from Waterstone’s, and he asked me what I’d bought. One of
the books was the original Meg. Feeling
like a kid caught reading a comic in class, I passed it to him.
He
gazed into the eyes of the gigantic prehistoric shark on the cover, and asked:
“What’s it about?”
Nightstalkers is the
fifth novel Alten has written about Megalodons, giant great white sharks from
prehistory which have somehow survived to the present day for some scientific
reason or other. Over the years, he’s dropped more exotic ingredients into the
soup, dredging old dinosaur spotters’ guides from his childhood for ever-bigger
and nastier aquatic monsters. He’s topped out with a Liopleurodon, acknowledged
as the biggest carnivore the world has ever seen, rendered here as a 120ft
crocodile with flippers and extremely bad manners.
Alten’s
increasingly squamous symphony has seen his nightmare menagerie eat dozens of
people as they clash with mankind. Deliciously, they also clash with each
other. The previous entry in the series, Hell’s
Aquarium, finished with a scrap between the Liopleurodon and Angel, the
biggest, baddest Megalodon in the sea. It was terrific, the underwater
death-match Ray Harryhausen would have dreamed of.
There’s
more of the same in Nightstalkers, as
we follow the Lio’s progress towards Antarctica. As ever, the story centres on
ace submersible pilot Jonas Taylor and his family. They used to run an aquarium
which housed Megalodons, but the creatures escaped thanks to some animal rights
saboteurs. The sharks showed their gratitude by eating a few of them. Taylor –
beset by legal problems thanks to his assets’ habit of straying off the menu - is
offered lots of money to help recapture the creatures, and in order to survive
financially he gets involved in the mayhem against his better judgment.
Taylor
is part of a plot to recapture Lizzy and Bela, Angel’s children, dreamed up by the
ambitious scientist Paul Agricola, the man partly responsible for luring the
original Megalodon from the depths (you can read about that in the ebook-only
short, Meg: Origins).
In
the earlier novels it seemed that focus would switch to Taylor’s daughter, but
his son, David, is now the star man of action. David has been left traumatised
by his experiences in the previous novel, which might have been better suited
to the title A Monster Ate My Girlfriend.
His skills as a mini-submarine pilot are required by his Middle Eastern backers
to capture the monsters of the deep for a brand new state-of-the-art aquarium
in Dubai. The stories of father and son move inexorably towards a collision.
How
did the monsters survive? Ach, it’s not really important, but Alten does a
commendable job in trying to align hard science with his lovably daft concept. At
first the megs are confined to temperate zones in the Mariana Trench, with
hydrothermal vents and sea-bed gigantism among both predator and prey allowing
the monsters to survive a long way from the surface, and human attention.
Then
it turned out there was an entire sea, hidden from view beneath the earth’s
crust, where all the giant sea reptiles survived, having evolved gills (does
that mean they’re still reptiles, then?). In Nightstalkers, we set our cryptozoological sights on the Antarctic
ice shelves – and what might be unleashed as the world heats up and melts them.
The
Meg stories have been very careful to outline the technology involved,
particularly the zippy mini-subs which leap past snapping gnashers with inches
to spare, like that bit in the intro to Stingray.
Alten sometimes overdoes the facts, figures and statistics. He’s very keen to
tell you how much water a super-tanker or a naval destroyer displaces, how much
it weighs, what it’s constructed with, or how it works, in big bites of data.
Some people like those details; personally speaking I’m fine with “it was a big
boat with guns and some nice boys in dress whites”. There’s no need to blind us
with science, but Alten’s done his working and he can show it in the space
provided. Many other authors (including this one) probably wouldn’t make that
much of an effort.
Other
nasties unleashed include packs of ichthyosaurs and the star prize, livyatan melvillei, a prototype sperm
whale, but a whole lot bigger with a fang-studded lower jaw on loan from an
orca. This is the kid who came into the yard and fluked sand into Moby Dick’s
blowhole, and Moby Dick didn’t do sh*t about it. A big part of my enjoyment of
this book was the suspicion that the big-ass whale, the two big-ass sharks and
the biggest ass of all, the Liopleurodon, were going to butt heads in a sort of
prehistoric World Cup. There is a creature feature smackdown at the end, though
I shall not go into detail here.
That’s
ignoring the plentiful moments of peril and death where various characters
either end up in a shark sandwich or escape by the skin of some very pointy
teeth. When the attack scenarios are outlined, it’s fun trying to guess who the
“redshirts” are going to be. Sometimes they all get out alive; sometimes they
all die; but it’s best when one luckless soul draws a short straw. My favourite
moment in the series (I think it’s in the third book, Primal Waters) is the part where an old lady and her wheelchair get
inhaled by Angel. Nightstalkers is
similarly stuffed full of unlucky buggers oblivious to the fact that their name
is on the specials board. My favourite part was when a hippyish animal lover who’s
into free-diving with great whites tries to feed the… with predictable...
I
enjoyed the return of Zachary Wallace, one of the lead characters in Alten’s
Nessie misfire, The Loch. Alten has
wisely dialled down the Scots dialogue this time, though he still makes the odd
error (no-one in Scotland says, “I’m off home for me tea”; it’s “I’m off home
for ma tea”. The “me” is an Anglified
corruption of “my”, rather than Caledonian). Not that it matters to anyone outside
of a country an eighth of the size of Texas, but if you’re going to tackle such
a complex demotic, it’s best to get it right.
Wallace’s
character introduces an element into this story which blew my mind a wee bit.
In a curious way it took me back to Ballard’s The Drowned World, which I was listening to in the car at roughly
the same time I was reading Nightstalkers
– a bonkers idea which upends the concept of the fictional world you thought
you knew.
This
idea (which I won’t spoil) doesn’t belong in a straightforward
boy-meets-monster affair, but fair play to Alten for trying it out. It seems
it’s linked to another novel of his, Vostok,
which also features the Nessie-wrangling Scot. The concept made me think of the
Genesis device in Star Trek, which may as well have been called Deus ex Machina, but the
scientific/philosophical treatise on our perceptions of time and reality was
fascinating.
No
more of that. Alten now seems very close to a 20-year dream becoming reality;
seeing Meg appear on the big screen.
At time of writing, Jonas Taylor will be played by Jason Statham in a movie due
to come out in 2018. I’m not getting my hopes up, as Meg is notorious for appearing on production slates, then being
dumped unceremoniously in the dock. That dreaded phrase, “in development”, has
been attached to the title for nearly 20 years. The disappointing performance
of Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla
movie is understood to have torpedoed plans for the original version; Peter
Jackson’s good-but-not-great King Kong
remake did for another, 10 years ago. At one stage, Jan de Bont was meant to
direct; at another, Eli Roth. It remains to be seen whether this film ever gets
made – and if it does, whether it angles more towards Jaws or Sharknado. Personally,
I would be braced for a title change. But these are exciting times for
Megheads.
Alten
held back publication of Nightstalkers
in order to coincide with a Meg movie
which might never come, so I’m glad he decided to just stick it out anyway, six
long years after Hell’s Aquarium. And
he promises that the story will continue, with Meg: Generations. When it does, I’ll be there.
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