Shark Fiction

With summer coming to a close, and beach vacations on hold until next year, it’s now safe to read about sharks. Guys especially seem to enjoy a good shark story. And it just takes one good book to convince someone that reading can be as entertaining as watching TV. In the list below, only the Meg series is a total shark attack story like Jaws, but sharks or the fear of sharks play a role in the other titles.

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bizell
Comic thriller about Dr. Peter Brown, a successful Mafia hit man who entered witness protection and turned to medicine, and who also has a fear of sharks.

Blind Willow by Huraki Murakami
Stories in this collection have Murakami’s matter-of-fact style combined with plausible but surreal premises to produce a dizzying adventure. In one story a mother loses her only son to a shark attack in Hawaii and then travels to the site of the accident for a vacation every year.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Already a classic, a survival story about 16-year-old Pi Patel who drifts in a lifeboat for 227 days through shark-infested waters while fighting hunger.

Meg: a Novel of Deep Terror by Steve Alten
A riveting tale of prehistoric Megalodon sharks spawned a series with the following sequels:
Meg: The Trench
Meg: Primal Waters
Meg: Hell's Aquarium

Raw Shark Texts by Stephen Hall
In this tale of awakening and discovery, a young man learns that the agony of losing the love of his life in a scuba-diving accident three years before has destroyed his memory.