Since Herman Melville introduced us to his whale Moby Dick, many other novels with marine blog aspirations have been lavished on these overseas adventures.
Although it is true that Melville's novel, published in the middle of the XNUMXth century, had a major point of transcendental travel, of adventure as a way of life, other later novels such as this Megalodon maintain that adventurous taste in a world mapped to the millimeter except in the abyssal zones of the oceans, where the last great surprises of our planet can await us.
And thanks to these spaces under the sea in which science can only probe and suppose, Steve Alten it has that necessary corner of ignorance to stage an encounter with the atavistic, with the extraordinary, even with the extraterrestrial, according to the imagination of each reader.
Jonas Taylor (perhaps in an anagrammatic tribute to the myth of the navigator Jason) travels on an expedition that aims to reach the depths of the Pacific Ocean. But everything ends badly when the crew faces the Carcharodon megalodon, ancestor of the great sea monsters. The problem, of course, is that although Taylor survives to tell the tale, no one believes they faced this prehistoric animal.
Among those who cannot believe Jonas Taylor at all and those who want to silence his theory for unaffordable interests, Jonas Taylor will always find someone who offers him support and faith, because that is the only thing that can be offered to a navigator like him, that reborn from hell insists on having faced the beast of the beasts of the sea.
The truth is that he is the only one left to tell. And the evidence of how the ship and the rest of the crew succumbed may raise doubts about the certainty of Jonas Taylor's story.
So, as a reader, and thanks to the magnificent descriptions of the author and the empathy achieved with the protagonist, you will only wish that Taylor once again has an opportunity to show the world how much there is to see in that underworld that rules under our continents ...
You can now buy the novel Megalodon, Steve Alten's great book, recovered for the cause in a new great edition, here: