The Trench

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Its appetite is ravenous. Its teeth scalpel-sharp. Its power unstoppable as it smashes the steel doors holding it in a Monterey, California aquarium. The captive twenty-ton Megalodon shark has tasted human blood, and it wants more.

On the other side of the world, in the silent depths of the ocean, lies the Mariana Trench, where the Megalodon has spawned since the dawn of time. Paleo-biologist Jonas Taylor once dared to enter this perilous cavern. He alone faced the monster and cut its heart out; and he wears the painful scars of that deadly encounter. Now, as the body count rises and the horror of the Meg's attack grips the California coast, Jonas must begin the hunt again.

But to do that means returning to the dark terror of the trench . . . where the Meg is waiting. Using himself as bait, Jonas will enter the ultimate battle - a fight to the death between man and beast in the darkest recesses of the ocean . . . and a fight for his sanity from the depths of his own tormented soul.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

So how bad is this spawn of Meg, which Doubleday declined to publish (albeit perhaps in an earlier version)? About as bad--and as good--as its predecessor. Alten can still write a mean giant prehistoric shark scene, but he flails like a fish out of water at nearly everything else (of his #1 human villain, psycho billionaire Benedict Singer, he writes, "Benedict stood before the window, his arms outspread, emerald eyes blazing as he reveled in his glory"). It's four years after the bloody doings of Meg, and Angel, the daughter of the Carcharadon megalodon of that novel, is now terrifying tourists at a Monterey aquarium. She escapes, however, and starts eating them--munching on yacht-goers, a kayaker, a submariner--and swallows other animals, including a media-darling whale named Tootie, before she returns to her home in the Pacific's Mariana Trench. The novel isn't all d j -vu shark action, though, since Alten bifurcates the narrative. While paleobiologist Jonas Taylor, who killed Meg, pursues Angel across the seas, his wife, Terry, suffers misadventures galore in the Trench as she tries to uncover exactly what that billionaire (who's in partnership with her father, who owns Angel), is up to 35,000 feet down: nasty work involving nuclear fusion supplies for terrorists, it turns out. Alten's evocation of the Trench and its dangers (including more prehistoric beasts), and of the machinery--subs, minisubs and a giant underwater station--that would challenge them, is evocative and backed by rigorous scientific detail. His human vs. human conflict is screechingly melodramatic and his dialogue littered with exclamation points, but when Angel rolls back her eyes and opens her jaws for the kill, readers will remember with a thrill why they picked up this novel in the first place. (July) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

VOYA - Joanna Morrison

Paleo-biologist Jonas Taylor has encountered the shark from hell. A Cacharodon megalodon, this living fossil is believed to be the ancestor of sharks such as the Great White. At sixty feet long, armed with seven-inch teeth, the Meg is the fiercest predator ever known. And hell is the Mariana Trench, the huge underwater canyon that is the deepest part of the planet. In Alten's first book, Meg (Doubleday, 1997), Taylor encountered this underwater nightmare. Not only did Taylor find and kill the Meg, he managed to capture a young Meg, which, when put on display, becomes even more popular than the killer whales of Seaworld. The young Meg, a female, manages to escape from the Tanaka Institute and wreak havoc along the Pacific coastline, engulfing--among other victims--an entire seagoing wedding party. Taylor vows to either recapture or kill it. Meanwhile his wife, Terry, has joined mysterious mogul Benedict Singer aboard a ship whose ostensible purpose is to investigate a recent accident in the Mariana Trench. Terry becomes aware that Singer's motives are not pure and must save herself from both Singer and his nefarious crew as well as... more prehistoric munchers from the Trench! Teens will eat this up. The Trench is recommended for readers who want non-stop suspenseful action, and who can also suspend a sense of disbelief. If Peter Benchley's Jaws (Crest, reissue 1991) or White Shark (St. Martin's, 1995) is in your school library, you will also want Alten's books. VOYA Codes: 3Q 4P S A/YA (Readable without serious defects; Broad general YA appeal; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12; Adult and Young Adult).

Library Journal

The Meg (Carcharodon megalodon, a really, really big shark) is back in this sequel to Meg (LJ 5/1/97), which picks up right where Alten's last killer thriller left off (in the second chapter there's even a two-page synopsis recapping the previous action and plot to bring new readers up to speed). Angel, the female offspring of the Meg killed last time around, is being held in captivity and displayed by hero Jonas Taylor and aquarium-owner Masao Tanaka. But Angel is huge and deadly; when she escapes from the aquarium, the predictable rock 'em-sock 'em mayhem ensues. So Jonas must face death and his own fears once again and return to the Marianas Trench in another attempt to rid the world of this prehistoric menace. Nearly a carbon-copy of Meg, this action-packed technothriller reads like a movie script and won't provoke many thoughts but will satisfy fans of Meg and Peter Benchley. Recommended for most fiction collections.--Rebecca House Stankowski, Purdue Univ. Calumet Lib., Hammond, IN Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A sequel to the riveting Meg (1997), continuing the adventures of a prehistoric shark with a mouth like a garage door that marauds in the ocean's upper waters along the California coast. In the previous installment, a supposedly extinct shark species was kept alive by the thermal warmth of smokers on the sea-bottom. When Meg and a pregnant female broke through the sludge and rose topside, all hell broke loose until the pregnant female's offspring was drugged and imprisoned in a Marine showcase near Monterey. Now, four years later, oxygen-rich waters and overfeeding have nurtured the captive Meg to a size larger than either her father or mother. She's in estrous and unfathomably hungry, can smell male sharks and tasty whales offshore, and at last breaks through the steel bars that have been placed between her and the open sea. Since she's just swallowed three young boys, she also has a taste for human flesh. Her rage to feed leads to some startling effects, including a female photographer's being bitten in half in her kayak, with Meg coming back to swallow the kayak and the body's other half. The humans, meanwhile, are total stereotypes, and some of their drama and its setting appear to have been borrowed from James Cameron's film The Abyss. Readers who saw Godzilla know that the climax must involve a whole family of monsters spreading about, although the present tale involves, as well, another extinct species: a reptile that's four or five times larger than Tyrannosaurus Rex doesn't get along with Meg. But don't think Alten will kill off his golden gobbler. Best scene: Meg copulating with a smaller male, than eating him—just a bridal whiff from Melville and D.H. Lawrence.Not exactly taxing on the intellectual side, but a nail-biting summer read. (Author tour)