Photo courtesy of NEFSC/NOAA
It is no secret that I have a love for Shark Week and, well, sharks in general. I’ve always found them to be fascinating creatures. Despite several of them appearing frightening and the stories that you hear on the news, they are only acting as animals act. There is no brutality specifically directed toward humans, and nothing evil about them. To quote Richard Dreyfuss’s character in “Jaws”, all they do “is swim, and eat, and make little sharks.” But that’s really the nature of any creature: self-sustainability, preservation, and survival. Sharks have evolved from creatures that used to live in the upwards of 420 million years ago. There has to be some respect towards an animal that has managed to survive and adapt in its environment over such a long period of time.
As a kid, I was always reading about sharks, and crocodiles, and wolves… I had some strange fascination with these apex predators which may or may not have influenced my writing in the dark/horror genre years later. I grew up reading Crichton’s Jurassic Park and watching Speilberg’s adaption of Benchley’s “Jaws”. And for years, I’ve wanted to be able to write my own “creature feature” book. With time, I’ve come to realize that both of these books treated the animals with a level of reverence and didn’t make them out to be just monsters. It’s the mistakes of humans, whether it be tampering with genetic engineering or placing oneself in the feeding territory of the animal, that caused the events to perpetuate. And so, I have silently for about a year, been working on an idea to write my own shark novel.
The Kat At Night 