Meg

Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror is a 1997 science fiction horror novel by the American author Steve Alten, and the first book in the MEG series. A film adaptation titled The Meg was released in 2018.

Jonas Taylor is a Navy deep-sea diver and the only survivor of a dive that went wrong. The novel opens with his claim to have encountered a prehistoric shark, and it makes his problem a matter of credibility rather than of evidence: he is treated as unreliable, and he responds by turning himself into a specialist, taking a doctorate in palaeontology and spending years lecturing and writing about the possibility that the animal survives in the deepest water.

His return to the ocean comes not from vindication but from a request for help, which is how the plot gets him back into the environment where the danger lives. The book pairs an underwater survival story with a debate about plausibility, and the revised edition released alongside the film added a prequel novella and a graphic novel adaptation followed in 2019. The animal at the centre of the story is given a scale rather than a glimpse: the average Meg is put at twenty tons, large enough to be described as capable of tearing a Tyrannosaurus rex apart.