This is by the same guy who wrote the Meg books, which I have not read, but I did see the movie because, hey, giant sharks. It all started when, maybe a week before I picked it up from the library, I started thinking about the Loch Ness monster, about which I have complicated feelings. I don’t believe in the Loch Ness monster, but I want to believe it in it hard enough that I might actually believe in it. Certainly I was devastated when (and am in a form of state of denial regarding) that famous photo of it was revealed to be a fake.

So, googling happened and I saw this book and can you believe it was available at the library? Apparently the market for nearly two decade old hack work is not booming. I blame the coronavirus.

The hero, Zachary Wallace, was born sickly, but amazingly grew up to play college football (American football), is descended from William Wallace of Mel Gibson fame, and who is , despite not sounding super educated, in possession of a doctorate in marine biology and enough technical know-how to build a giant squid attractor. Like I said, I didn’t read The Meg, but saw the movie and you can definitely imagine Jason Statham pretending to have a PhD in the movie version of this book.

This novel doesn’t just have a handsome PhD hero, a buxom wench with childhood connections to said hero, a sensational murder trial, and a Loch Ness monster (no, the secret is not that Loch Ness is incapable of supporting any kind of large monster, making the real villain man’s inhumanity to man and also global warming, though there is a little bit about oil being bad for marine life, but it turns out, it was kind of a fluke caused by one bad actor and so most drilling is totally ok)… it also has the Knights Templar!

And the hero is super impressed with the knowledge his dad passes on (‘I was amazed at the depth of his knowledge,’ he says while daddy dearest explains how the Scottish Freemasons are Templars, just like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, who totally ripped off the super democratic ideas of an order of military monks when writing the Declaration of Independence, which I used to think was written by Jefferson, though actually Adams deserves more credit, but what am I saying is, it’s Templars, you fool!). It’s a veritable grab bag conspiracies to make that Da Vinci Code guy proud (but he shouldn’t be; he should feel ashamed all the time, the kind of shame a man might feel if his sainted mother caught him abusing himself while leafing through a carefully curated collection of  Wilfred Brimley photos, because his books are terrible). To read about the hero (who, again, is supposed to have doctoral degree) praising his (maybe) wrongfully accused, alcoholic, womanizing (which includes sex with minors, which, while noted in the novel, doesn’t feel like is properly recognized as being a super bad thing to do, but maybe not surprising, because the hero opens the book as a professor at Florida Atlantic University, where in addition to teaching marine biology and being super handsome and smart, he is also engaged to an undergraduate he met because she was in his class, which is totally an ok thing to do, right, but it’s also ok, because they break up because, and this will blow your mind, undergrads aren’t always super emotionally mature and she was kind of ditz because, you know, women, amirite? high five guys!) father for his grasp of… history, I guess, really takes one out of the moment. Did I mention there is an rogue branch of the Knights Templar, imaginatively named the Black Knights, presumably after the famed Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (the last I saw it was at a midnight showing and my wife almost divorced me for taking her; the time before that, I fell asleep during the movie and when I woke up, Joe Lieberman was telling me that we’d invaded Iraq; on the other hand, what a great movie and you can’t go more than five minutes into an in-depth discussion of the sources behind Eliot’s modernist classic, The Wasteland, before someone says ‘Nee!’).

So, a lot going on here, and I swear that none of the books many plot reveals look like they were put together using a broken Magic 8 Ball and a set of Erich Von Daniken playing cards.

One interesting conceit is that, in addition to claiming descent from Mel Gibson’s nom de guerre, the hero’s family also claims relation to Alfred Russel Wallace, who worked on a theory of evolution in parallel to Darwin (Darwin was actually encouraged publish Origin, which he had been dithering over, because he was told that Wallace was close to beating him to the punch). Excerpts from his writings pepper the beginnings of chapters and I found them fascinating, though they failed to gussy up the book in the classy veneer which Mr. Alten no doubt intended. You seen, any class which nineteenth century scientific writings may have added is more than equally subtracted by clauses like ‘my groin awakening for the first time in months.’ Also, by tossing in the occasional Darwin or Gould excerpt, he weakens the semi-unique conceit of the ancestral relationship to Wallace, but, hey, book learning!

However my hands down favorite literary flourish, redolent of Finnegans Wake‘s finest fart jokes (actually, Finnegans Wake does have a lot of fart jokes, only they are just as impossible to understand as the rest of the book) is the way characters, every time someone else says ‘but,’ interject ‘- butts are for crapping.’ Unless they’re doing a really deep Scottish thing, in which case its ‘butts er fer crappin’, dinna ya ken, ya wee laddie!’ I’m transported. You can already smell the fresh highland air of a free and independent Scotland, can’t you? So evocative.

But, when this potboiler finally reaches its heart pounding conclusion, it’s gotta be exciting right? Actually, the finale was too cluttered. It was like one of those action movies where the director keeps the camera moving and cutting so you can’t figure out what’s happening (check out the final shootout in Johnny To’s Drug War for a masterclass in how to film a visually coherent and exciting action sequence). Which is even worse in a book than it is in a movie. Also, our intrepid hero was going to free the monster, but then decided, meh, let’s kill it. This is after determining it wasn’t her fault (the monster is a girl) that she had become aggressive because of specific environmental damage caused by humans, but, meh, let’s blame an animal for all our sins. And let’s, I kid you not, kill it with William Wallace’s sword. I would say you couldn’t make that up, but obviously someone did, but I think that it would be correct to say, you could make that up, but you probably shouldn’t. Also, the hero is supposed to be a marine biologist. Typically, wouldn’t one be less blithe about slaughtering a hitherto unknown marine animal (it’s an eel, by the way, a giant eel)?

So if you like Monarch of the Glen fanfiction, history gleaned from cursory glances at wikipedia articles, and you also like giant sharks, then this book is that other book by the guy who wrote that other book about the giant shark and which also has those other things.