Unbelievably batty

DUBAI: An impossibility is being taken to the Middle East. The transport vessel Tonga is carrying a liopleurodon to the City of Gold. But while investors gawk at the prehistoric creature, an even more dangerous creature is beginning to stir.

The megalodon shark that Jonas Taylor worked so hard to capture is coming out of it’s drug-induced stupor and refuses to be contained. Now both ancient creatures, older than mankind itself, are loose in the waters of the Arabian Sea, and the region will never be the same.

I’ve been a fan of cheesy monster plots since well, as far as I can remember and Steve Alten’s Meg series fell straight into this crack of a thing I have. A prehistoric monster shark is like Jaws on steroids, so it’s a no-brainer that my own cheesy love for these creatures far outstrips the sometimes-cringeworthy way the various screenplays or books are written.

But the Meg series has come a long way, bagging movie rights along the way, and perhaps this too, has expanded into a franchise that has gotten too big for my liking. Action-driven scenes, a fragmented storyline shooting out in different directions and multiple POVs made for flat 2-dimensional characters—characters who only come to life because of the familiarity gained through reading Alten’s first few Meg books. (The lack of formatting here made the reading experience infinitely more annoying and confusing)

It’s pure entertainment if you like—albeit a hard to follow one if you’ve not read the past few books—with take-it-or-leave-it dialogues, condensed science-fiction, designed so you don’t have to think much about it as scene after scene flip by without much nuanced thought about characters and their personalities, their morals or the unvaried speeches they give.

The loose link here is the Tanaka/Taylor family and the new generation along with the sharks’ offsprings, with the added layers of complications of politics, businesses capitalising on mega-predators, wealthy investing and all the other issues that come with the world discovering that prehistoric (and huge) predators do live among us…if you know where to look.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with Meg: Generations; however, I was hoping it would have mirrored the clarity and good ol’ directness of the first few books at least. This was barely readable, somehow and with the cliffhanger ending, I was just ready to throw it all in.