This all starts back when the Nazi's were still in command and they were just being stopped from doing the evil things that they did. It all starts one a German U-boat picks up Ernst Kruger a German scientist. They had loaded his creation on the submarine not knowing what was inside of the box. Doing the loading of the box the submarine did not get welded together quickly enough and when they had to do a dive the submarine implode in the year 1945. Now here it is 1996 where the U-boat is found by people taking pictures for the National Geographic magazine. They remove the box and bring it aboard their ship where Webber the camera man decides to open it after he is told not too. He ends up being killed by the creature, the box ends up sliding off of the ship between The Block and Waterboro. Now the creature is loose and can feed whenever it feels like it. The creature attacks 3 more people and kills them. Simon Chase a local scientist, Tall Man, and Max, who is Simon's son, are studying great white sharks while all of this is happening and has a pregnant female great white tagged for studying. He ends up sharing his insitute with Amanda Williams another scientist who is studying whales with using sea lions to tape the footage. MAx is excited to be working with the sea lions and getting to play with them. While they are out one of the sea lions that Amanda brings alongs gets killed in the water by the creature. The creature then learns to walk on land and breath out of water. But once it learns how to breath out of water it cannot remember how to invert the process so he can now breath in water when he wants too. The creature then goes on to kill another person. Then somebody comes along knowing what the creature is and how the creature was formed and the name of the creature. They call the creature The White Shark also known as Der Weisse Hai in german. Jacob Franks showed up wanting to kill the creature that he helped make with Ernst Kruger and his son Rudi was going to help him along with Rusty Puckett. The creature's name was Heunrich Guenther who was a cold blooded killer to begin with. Simon Chase, Tall Man, Amanda, Max, and Elizabeth (a girl from town who max liked) ended up killing Heunrich Guenther the creature after Tall Man had been injured.Simon and Amanda ended up basically blowing the creature up, because even though the creature was half-human it was more animal than human anymore.This book is such an amazing read that I had to give it a 5 star rating. Peter Benchley sure does know how to get his audience's attention and keep it caught throughout the whole book. I did not want to put this book down I wanted to read it from beginning to end. Yes there is a movie out that goes to this book and it is called Peter Benchley's The Creature. There is another copy of the book called The Creature which is the same as this book, but comes in paperback. I recommend this book to everybody. I sure did enjoy this book and I hope you do too.
A Nazi experiment is lost at sea at the end of World War II and lies dormant on the bottom of the ocean for decades. When the wreckage of the U-Boat that housed it is found, an unknown horror is accidentally released…and it hungers. Off the coast of Connecticut, Simon Chase is studying sharks and their behavior and adjusting to a visit by his son Max. When Simon realizes something is amiss in the water, the Nazi’s ultimate weapon will be revealed!Written by Peter Benchley, White Shark was published by Random House in May of 1994. The book was met with average reviews and was rereleased as Creature in 1997 to help tie in to a made-for-TV movie released in 1998 starring Craig T. Nelson and Kim Cattrall.While Jaws was filled with scares and chills, White Shark is rather lacking. A quick and easy read, the book is rather harmless but not memorable. Flat characters, a predictable plot, and a creature that never fully develops leads White Shark to be a bit of a problem.I will say that Benchley found his niche with Jaws. You know when picking up a Benchley story, you are probably going to get a New England coast horror story. White Shark is no different and feels like putting on an old shoe if you are familiar with Benchley’s writing. All his characters and situations are rather repetitive of his other writing and White Shark lacks that the originality of something like Jaws.If Benchley created great characters, I could maybe forgive the lack of scares, but the main cast of the novel represents the cast of every one of his novels. To be blatant, even Jaws characters were written rather generic, but the packaging of the whole story helped. Benchley owes Spielberg gratitude for cleaning up some of Jaws’ problems, but White Shark doesn’t have that luxury.The basic concept also raises problems for me. Benchley generally based his story in science and biology. Jaws was a large great white shark. The “beast” was a giant squid that existed on the Earth (but an extreme version). White Shark is science-fiction. It isn’t science based and doesn’t have the realism that I did like from the story. I couldn’t be afraid of the monster because it was fictitious and I’m pretty sure if I go to the beach a genetically engineered humanoid shark isn’t going to eat me.White Shark is a rather bland book that is a quick read. If you must read a Benchley book, stick with Jaws. As it turned out White Shark represented the last of Benchley’s fiction writing. The author died in 2006 after having a turnabout regarding his role in the persecution of great white sharks…I think this is more of an offense to them than Jaws.
What do You think about White Shark (1995)?
An entertaining enough horror story, but I can't help but wonder if Benchley's pre-writing brainstorm went a little something like this:"I feel bad for making every one hate sharks with Jaws... Man is much more dangerous, we kill a lot more sharks than sharks kill humans... What if I wrote a book about a shark eating man! No that sounds boring. Needs more Hitler... What if I wrote a book about an underwater mutant shark man that eats people AND sharks... AND is a NAZI!Perfect."As ridiculous as it sounds, still quite entertaining.
—Scott Stoddard
This was a fun, junk food kind of read. Having recently read Jaws for the first time, I was really struck by how modern the language is in White Shark. Whereas the former is dense with rich language/purple prose, the latter was a lot more stark and straight to the point. So that was something interesting about it. In a lot of ways, this read like one of Steve Alten's shark books. Let me just say that I like Meg, but it isn't a well wrought book and this wasn't completely either. It sort of feels like in both cases, someone sat down to write a screenplay then went back and filled in the gaps between dialogue with narrative.With that said, this book is really sort of meta in that it makes reference to Jaws by name in direct fashion and it is also filled with a bunch of statistical data/facts/etc. The formatting was similar to Jaws in that we get portions/chapters written from the creatures point of view that make you think about the havoc we've wreaked on the ocean, but what's the biggest problem this book has?Benchely telegraphs a lot of what happens later on in the story in big ways to the point of utter predictability. When certain people, animals, gear, and etc. are introduced it is like a big red flag that says, "Remember this, because whatever you think I'm going to do with these things in the story is totally what I'm going to do."If you got this far into the review then you must think I didn't like it. No, no, no. I couldn't put it down once I decided that I wanted to finish it and I was intrigued by the mystery of it all. I just think that it didn't have the lyrical sprawl of Jaws and it didn't keep you guessing. This would make a killer b-movie though, pardon the pun.
—Alan
I read "Jaws" by Peter Benchley, and thought this was going to be about another shark. I love sharks and was kind of bummed that this wasn't really about a shark, but instead some weird mutant human that was called the "white shark". I couldn't even really get a visual of whatever it was they were describing until the end of the book. I love marine biology so Amanda's character and all the information relating to the ocean and Sea Lions was interesting. I also really liked Max, Chase, and Tall M
—Ashlee Telschow
