Book Review: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall is a rather strange novel. It concerns a man who wakes up with no memory of his existence. He is informed that he is Eric Sanderson, but a series of notes written by the real, or previous, Eric Sanderson indicate that nothing is as it seems. The man who may be Eric begins having dreams of sharks attacking him, followed by loss of memory. Stephen Hall opens up a disturbing new world in which dreams and waking, reality and fiction combine to comment on the influx of media controlling modern society.

The prose is appropriately confused. You get the sense that this man has no idea what is happening without getting lost in the story. The events are presented clearly: it is the mind that is confused.

Hall's novel is incredibly descriptive and diverse. The images he creates come alive in the mind to enhance such a strange concept for a novel. What genuinely should not work is made palatable buy a gifted hand. Even when the novel shifts into a symbolic and psychological thriller going into the last hundred pages, the logic of the novel makes sense because of everything established. Raw Shark Texts is a mystery, a romance, a coming of age story, a dark comedy, a horror story, and a suspense/thriller all wrapped up. Perhaps one of the more remarkable elements of the novel is the word art. Amazingly detailed images of sharks and maps are produced with nothing but letters on the page. While the conceit may seem extraneous in a review, it works beautifully in the novel. By then, you understand the stakes of the novel and how these sharks in the man's dreams actually work.

Steven Hall designed a novel based on observation. Text you are introduced to in the first chapter are reevaluated over and over until the man finally begins to understand what is happening. By that point, the action of the novel has left his bedroom and is traveling steadily through England on a quest to find the one man that can help the man understand and overcome his identity crisis.

I highly recommend reading Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. Truly original novels like this are a rarity, especially in the thriller mold. Hall manages to take the mundane and expected within the genre and make it seem fresh and new again with an exciting premise built around significant issues in modern society.