Meg Mania
Posted by: Loren Coleman on May 9th, 2009
The New York Times best-selling author Steve Alten appeared on Fox News on Friday, May 8th, promoting his latest book, MEG: Hell’s Aquarium.
MEG: Hell’s Aquarium is the fourth in Alten’s MEG series, which are all thrillers about the continued survival of Carcharodon megalodon, the 70 foot long, 70,000 pound, supposedly extinct prehistoric cousin of the extant great white shark.
Steve Alten is promoting this book throughout the summer of 2009, aided by the largest Megalodon shark jaw in existence (shown above). It is a rather remarkable way to get publicity, after all. Members of the media and the general public are more easily able to visualize the enormous size of this shark with Alten’s exhibit “A,” you must admit!
Also, Alten has this new book trailer:
Hey, the International Cryptozoology Museum would love to have a Meg mandible of its own for exhibition, but pure institutional survival is the key, first and foremost.
Consider a contribution today, and merely click to…
Meg jaws tend to be major attractions for museums and press events!
- Similar Phenomena:



Never read the MEG books, Loren, unfortunately.
This might convince me to read them. Love the Jaw size! Wow!
Probably not as good as Benchley…but I’ll give them a try.
Somebody Make the freaking movie already! For petes sake there making Piraniah 3-d about prehistoric hungry fishies gettting loose.
Exhibit A, has, we must remember, been discredited as an overlarge reconstruction. Still it’s a heck of an attention-grabber.
I would love to see a top-quality movie made from Alten’s ideas. Meg is, after all, a terrifically scary creature. I suspect the problem with greenlighting a Meg movie is that there have been several cheap and terrible ones (not based on Alten’s work). Studios may ask whether it’s still worth financing a good film. (If they do, here’s how to promote it: life size cardboard reproductions of the Meg jaws in theater lobbies. People will notice.)
I panned Alten’s first Meg book (to put it mildly) on science and on characterization. However, I think Alten got much better by the third Meg book and turned out an excellent novel on Loch Ness, with three-dimensional characters and believable science. So Hell’s Aquarium is on my reading list.
Matt Bille
Turns out Meg will swim into theaters in 2011! If they don’t pull that off, then at least jump start the Jaws flicks again.
A movie-like trailer for a book. That’s… kind of odd.
Still, I would love to see one day the door entrance of the Cryptozoology museum fashioned with a replica of a Meg jaw!