What Peter Benchley set out to commit here was not an act of literature but an act of literary commerce. The Beast ( Part one) The master of sea terror, Peter Benchley, returns with another salty tale of aquatic mayhem Rocked by mysterious deaths and disappearances, a small f. Yet in spite (or because) of all this, ''Beast'' is an immensely enjoyable reading experience. Still, the language is overly familiar, the images cliched and the endless anthropomorphizing Benchley undertakes on behalf of the giant squid would give any malacologist a migraine. Although one probably can spot every development in the plot from 20,000 fathoms away, knowledge of what is going to happen is unlikely to diminish the reader`s enjoyment when it does.īenchley obviously did not set out to write cutting-edge literary fiction, and criticizing the book for not being what it never tried to be is unfair. There was weakness in all prey'' and other more-or- less Darwinian, literarily regrettable, utterances.īut just because ''Beast'' is melodrama doesn`t mean that it`s ineffective.

These sections feature such phrases as ''And the need that was overwhelming, now that it was moving and consuming energy, was hunger,'' ''The creature sought weakness. To avoid confusion and to capitalize on the miniseries adaptation, the book was republished as Creature in 1997. 1 It is similar to Jaws, but it does not feature a shark, despite what the title suggests. Early in the novel short chapters introducing various characters and setting the plot in motion are broken by very short (two or three pages) meditations on what lurks deep, deep in the waters off Bermuda. PETER BENCHLEY : Jaws / Beast / The Girl of Sea of Cortez - 20th Anniversary Edition - WINGS PRESS in the Other Antiquarian & Collectable category was. White Shark is a 1994 novel by author Peter Benchley, famous for Jaws, The Island, Beast and The Deep. Soon others become part of the creature`s diet, but Benchley takes his sweet time identifying the nature of the beast.

Beast by Peter Benchley