Jaws by Peter Benchley

[Uncle TechTip]

James Hebert's Rats trilogy was the same, every passage is either someone hiding from rats, someone being devoured by rats or people having rough, animalistic sex in view of some rats.

[Cerys]

You missed out the bit with the large-breasted woman screaming while flailing her tits around like an erotic dancer with a rat firmly attached to each nipple.

[ToneLa]

James Hebert's Rats trilogy was the same, every passage is either someone hiding from rats, someone being devoured by rats or people having rough, animalistic sex in view of some rats.

Ditto Shaun Hutson's Slugs, word for word, just swap out rats for slugs

Ditto Zadie Smith's White Teeth

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

Ditto Zadie Smith's White Teeth

At this, I did laugh. Welcome back, ToneLa!

[kalowski]

You missed out the bit with the large-breasted woman screaming while flailing her tits around like an erotic dancer with a rat firmly attached to each nipple.

Classic Herbert. I remember the school teacher and his naked class in The Fog, getting them to chop off his massive erection with shears (equipment you find in every school gym).

[Keebleman]

Classic Herbert. I remember the school teacher and his naked class in The Fog, getting them to chop off his massive erection with shears (equipment you find in every school gym).

I had to stop reading the book at that point.  I was 13 or 14.  This is depraved, I thought, or, to use the term my dad often employed about gratuitous horror, unhealthy.  Of course by setting the book aside at that juncture meant I missed the first class lesbian scene a couple of chapters later.

[Cerys]

Weren't the shears being wielded by the bus-driver-cum-grounds-keeper?

[kalowski]

Weren't the shears being wielded by the bus-driver-cum-grounds-keeper?

I read it in 1987 so I can't remember.

[MojoJojo]

Die Hard is another great movie based on a crap book (Nothing Lasts Forever).

[JesusAndYourBush]

I've been making my way through a stack of old scifi books, I decided to read them in the order I had them on the shelf (random, not alphabetised etc) rather than let my own preference pick out what I thought might be the better ones.  For some reason Jaws by Peter Benchley has found it's way among them but I skipped over it, but after seeing this thread I realise I must read it.

Another book that's different from the film is ET.  The one I have is based on a very early version of the screenplay - I guess they were in such a hurry to get it in book form they didn't wait until they'd finished tinkering with it.  Differences are interesting, but not massive, there's a lot of stuff about what the characters are thinking which you can't carry off in a screenplay.  And ET has the hots for Elliot's mother.

[Cerys]

Heh - with both Jaws and ET I read the book before I saw the film.  Ditto Poltergeist.  And The Exorcist, now I come to think of it.

[Twit 2]

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/mar/13/boris-johnson-coronavirus-hero-mayor-larry-vaughn-jaws

[George White]

Neil's thread about The Godfather - which I haven't read - immediately put me in mind of Peter Benchley's Jaws, the novel upon which Jaws (Shark Film) was based.

I suspect my experience of reading it for the first time isn't uncommon. Watched the film as a kid, loved it, then picked up a copy of the novel for 50p in a second-hand book shop. The way it deviates from the film in an 'adult' way is awfully confusing for a teenager expecting a page-turning yarn about three men versus a big fuck-off shark.

I'll spoiler the rest of this in case anyone hasn't read it.

Spoiler alert

Matt Hooper and Ellen Brody have an affair in the book. Benchley describes their sex-making in graphic, animalistic terms which, I assume, are supposed to echo the way he writes about the shark eating humans. "DO YOU SEE?? WE'RE ALL RAVENOUS BEASTS REALLY!!" But it's just really unpleasant, and I blame Benchley for making the teenage virgin me think that sex involves a lot of cold angry gurning, straining and eye-popping (turns out he was right, eh readers??).

There's a weird bit near the start of the book where Benchley describes Chief Brody having a morning piss in unnecessarily prolonged detail.

You can't root for anyone, as they're all pricks.

Quint dies, not by being eaten, but by being harpoon-strapped to the shark a la Moby Dick. BORING.

The shark isn't blown to pieces by Brody at the end, it just goes "Fuck this, I'm dead" due to its wounds. BORING.

The subplot with the local council keeping the beaches open due to pressure from the Mafia is utter bilge. No wonder Spielberg got rid of it, plus everything else I've mentioned.

[close]

Is Peter Benchley's Jaws unique? A shit book that was turned into a classic film? Spielberg and Gottlieb nabbed the winning central concept and jettisoned pretty much everything else. And thus a masterpiece was born.

The Poseidon Adventure book is a similar piece of Harold Robinson (sic)-esque Transatlantic Tripe. Has a lot more British characters, and a nasty subplot where Susan, the teenager is raped by her crush, a  sailor from Hull, who then is killed, but she is so besotted with him,  she doesn't mind, then believes she's pregnant and decides to move to Yorkshire to meet his family.

[hummingofevil]

I blind read a passage of this out loud to a class of kids the other day. I was on supply (im a Physics teacher but love doing random whatever on daily basis) and hadn't read it in advance and the last paragraph was a child getting bitten in half. It genuinely made me and thirty 13 year olds flinch so yeah its is a great bit of wriiting.

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/mar/13/boris-johnson-coronavirus-hero-mayor-larry-vaughn-jaws

That's actually quite funny. An amusing piece of satire in The Guardian, well I never. Truly we are living in strange times.

[Quisby]

When I was in Primary 4 or 5, so I would have been 10 or 11, we got a new teacher Miss Driffel, straight out of teacher training and keen to be down with the kids. I was in the top reading group and we complained about the childishness of the books we were given so the teacher said we could pick the next one. The only criteria was it had to be a book we all had access to. I can't remember who came up with the idea but we chose Jaws because all our dads had copies and it probably sounded like a fun, gory read. The teacher agreed, presumably not having read it. Six of us would sit around in a circle reading a page or two each. It became clear that there were a lot of swear words and sexual references. Not to be deterred Miss Driffel told us not to read those words out but to replace them with a whistle or a raspberry. God knows what it sounded like - some kind of kiddy Norman Collier recitation of sex and violence. This went on for a couple of weeks until the teacher was ill and the headmaster took over the class. He went ballistic and the next week we were back to reading The Hardy Boys or Three Investigators or whatever it was.

[Artie Fufkin]

I'm another 'loved this book when I read it when I was about 12, and have subsequently forgot about Mafia involvement'. I have it on my Kindle 'to read' pile, been meaning to re-read it for ages.
Benchley's actually in the film, don't you know.
Apologies if you already know this.
Which you probably do.

[El Unicornio, mang]

I'm sure I read a thing years ago about how Jaws was the most common book to find in second hand shops. 20 million copies sold and I imagine at least half due to the film.

[Cerys]

I have owned two copies, and both were bought second-hand.  I had to buy the second because Ben Gluck borrowed the first and never gave it back.  I forgive him for that, though, because he made me laugh like a drain by doing that thing where you mash your gob against a window and then open it.  The gob, that is.  Opening the window wouldn't have been as funny.

[idunnosomename]

pretty sure now it's 50 shades. charity shops can make dwellings out of that bullshit and its sequels