Writing a Killer Shark Novel (or making a Killer Shark Movie)

This might be one of my bucket list things. Write a great Killer Shark Novel. I love killer shark books and movies, and I love them even more when they are done well. Jaws is a great read and a great movie, and is obviously the pinnacle of anything killer shark related. At the bottom end, we have schlock like Sci-Fi channel specials ("Mega-Shark versus Giant Octopus!" or my new favorite "Sharktopus!") and we also have the bottom end of literature - Steve Alten's Meg sequels (the first was pretty good, but they pretty quickly nosedive into schlock).

Let's look at two common problems that Killer Shark Novels face, and see if we can't brainstorm a way around them.

1. The Setting. Sharks live in water. Duh. Shark attacks, therefore, happen in water. So the first problem we have to deal with is why don't our protagonists just stay out of the water. We have a few approaches. Jaws, for instance, needs the beaches open for economic reasons. This is the most basic motivation - we can't get all the people out of the water in time, for some reason. So we have a quest to kill the beast before it kills others.

There are a couple other ways to get around this setting issue. For one, we can always go the route of White Shark (by Peter Benchley) - the shark evolves(!) lungs and can then walk and attack on land. Those wacky Nazis!

There's also Deep Blue Sea method - bring the setting to the sharks! In Deep Blue Sea, the laboratory the scientists are working on sinks and the sharks get in. It gets even crazier / cooler in the proposed sequel Deep Red Sea (which never materialized) - where a tower would fall into the ocean and sink partially, allowing the sharks to attack a hotel.

2. The Creature. Generally, we have to start looking at larger sharks for them to be a serious and continual threat to human beings. Sharks under 10 feet, whilst still possessing sharp and dangerous teeth, are not usually regarded as a terrible threat. Under 20 feet, and we may not be looking a repeat or multiple offender. Once we're at that 20 feet threshold, we have a creature that's large enough to do damage and one that considers a human being a proper sized meal. Unfortunately, sharks rarely get that large. When you rule out rather benign species, we're looking at Great Whites, as a rule of thumb.

We could always genetically engineer a smaller shark to be larger (Deep Blue Sea) or resurrect an extinct shark (Meg), but this runs us into other problems. Genetic engineering pigeonholes us into a story about... the perils of genetic engineering. And the extinct sharks we deal with (primarily the Megalodon) tend to be too large. The main shark in the Meg series is 72 feet long; at that point, eating humans is a waste of energy.

I suppose a school or swarm of smaller sharks would be dangerous as well, but thats basically the plot of Piranha. And even small sharks can be dangerous if there's no way to escape them or fend them off (Open Water).

So there we go. The two common stretches that we'd need to make to create worthwhile Killer Shark Story. We need a setting and we need a creature. The setting gives us the excuse for the creature. There are two ways to make the Killer Shark Story memorable - take existing tropes/settings/creature and write it really well - or use a new setting/creature.

A new creature tends to be outlandish - look at all the Sci-Fi specials out there. So what do we have for a new setting? What ways can we think of to bring the humans to the sharks (Or vice versa)?