Punching Day: Peter Benchley’s White Shark (Patreon)

Peter Benchley was a third-generation novelist, presidential speechwriter, and journalist who wrote two books - Jaws and Jaws But A Different Monster. His works include The Island (Jaws But Pirates); Beast (Jaws But A Squid); The Deep (Jaws But A Wet T-Shirt); and White Shark (Jaws But A Nazi Shark Man). So if you think about it, he really only wrote one book, and that book is White Shark.

White Shark is a popcorn action thriller about a Street Shark with the kind of tattoos that shut down a cookout, and it is my favorite book ever written. It isn't my favorite story, it’s not fun to read, and it isn’t tied to a cherished memory. I’ve only read it twice, and even at age 11, I could tell twice was enough.

No, White Shark is my favorite book because it was the moment I learned that even the world-famous author of Jaws will sometimes write a story about a pussy-hunting scientist named Simon Chase who must fist-fight a muscular shark man on a private island in Connecticut. It was my first lesson that grownups play with action figures too, only they do it inside of their minds. It was an early glimpse into the world of cocaine, without fully understanding the signs or how I was detecting them. White Shark wasn’t the first time I thought, “Maybe Peter Benchley isn’t that good,” but it was the first time I realized, “Maybe Peter Benchley is a fucking maniac.” In many ways it inspired me to become a writer, because if this throbbing hulk of adolescent make-believe could terrorize the front window of Barnes & Noble, then no idea of mine would ever be too stupid.

Benchley was like the Michael Crichton of National Geographic. He used his background in marine biology and boating to make his stories sound more plausible, which is why the first several chapters of White Shark are dedicated to German U-boat construction and the feeding habits of deep sea tube worms. It keeps you distracted with science so you don’t notice the Nazi shark man sneaking past the bouncer. Speaking of National Geographic, a NatGeo photographer discovers an evil steampunk casket covered in Nazi shit at the bottom of the ocean and opens it, releasing the shark man, code named Der Weisse Hai (“the white shark”). White supremacists love terminally nerd-assed code names; they’re all “grand wizards” and “grand dragons” and “cyclopses” and “meltors.” Only one of those is fake, and it’s not the stupidest one. Der Weisse Hai lurks in the water off the New England coast for several chapters, eating people and thinking the pickled thoughts of a racist Olympian spliced into a two-legged shark by heretical science. Then it activates Land Mode by draining its lungs to breathe air. This is when the novel becomes really exciting, because suddenly we’re contending with a piece of fiction about one of the Shredder’s evil mutants written by a 54-year-old former Newsweek editor.

Benchley was a hugely successful writer who wasn’t particularly good at telling a story. It’s fascinating. His ideas were interesting - a killer shark parks at a luxury beach and won’t go away, no matter how hard they ignore it. An island of pirates lives undiscovered into the modern day, led by their buccaneer king David Warner. A sunken WWII treasure horde of gold & heroin waits to be plundered, guarded by drug cartels and a giant eel. Jaws is so good Benchley sold it before one word was written, and the film rights were sold before the book was published. That’s important - people were hyped over the *idea* of Jaws, completely independent of any words Peter Benchley had actually written. In fact, Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Carl Gottlieb all but ignored Benchley’s novel when they made the movie. That’s because Benchley couldn’t figure out how to tell a story about a killer shark, so he wrote about the mafia and an imploding marriage instead. (See “Peter Benchley isn’t very good,” above.) In his story, the mayor’s goons stop by Chief Brody’s house and kill the family cat. Hooper has an uncomfortably sweaty affair with Brody’s wife, and Brody shoots Hooper in the face. Hooper is already dead at that point, his mission in the shark cage having gone much more poorly than it does for Richard Dreyfuss, but it’s weird any of these scenes exist in the first place.

For some reason, Benchley thought the story of Jaws was “What hot goss in City Hall would keep the beaches open during a public safety crisis?” It’s a seedy book raging against bureaucrats, women, and the waspy elite, completely tone deaf to the fact that Benchley himself was a third-generation writer and boating enthusiast. The shark appears even less than it does in the film. In four decades of watching the movie, it never once entered my mind that nautical menswear representative the Honorable Larry Q. Vaughn needed a secondary motivation to ignore the killer shark. “Money” was enough of a reason. That subplot was so unnecessary Mayor Vaughn is a meme we share about our elected officials. Brody doesn’t need to be a jaded cynic distracted by his wife’s infidelity for the shark to swim roughshod all over the island; the movie trades all that grime for a single scene in which Brody tries to close the beach and gets shouted down by the mayor and the wealthy business owners on the board of selectors. Benchley was so bad at storytelling that he got thrown off the set of Jaws for arguing with Steven Spielberg over the ending. In Spielberg’s ending, Brody says “Smile you son of a bitch” and bullseyes a tank of compressed air that blows the shark’s head apart like a sea mine. In Benchley’s ending, the shark gets tired and dies. I would’ve kicked Benchley the hell out, too. He became a world-famous author because he sold an idea about a killer shark story that wound up in the hands of one of history’s most successful and celebrated filmmakers. The killer shark novel he actually wrote is absolute trash. I can only assume Benchley would’ve had similarly firm opinions about Schindler’s List. Which is to say I think he would've made Ralph Fiennes’ character a shark man.

Don’t misunderstand me - I love White Shark for the sheer fact of its existence, and I still enjoy the story to this day. It’s a batshit idea that delivers on its promise more fully than Benchley did with his Jaws manuscript. Reading Jaws remains one of the biggest disappointments of my life, like going trick or treating for office supplies. The movie Jaws is a Boys’ Life adventure story about hunting a killer shark, whereas Benchley’s source novel is a sleazy cab ride downtown to pawn a baby rattle. A big fish shows up occasionally, but mostly it’s about how marriage and public safety are absolute drags that cut into your Man Time. Benchley was so focused on making Jaws a story for grownups that he forgot to make it any fun. White Shark was a shock in the opposite direction, because it was closer to the Alien vs Predator paperbacks I was reading at the same time. It’s short, it’s dumb, and it’s genuinely fun when all the threads come together and you realize you’ve been reading a story about a hulking shark man grown in a vat by Nazi lunatics. That’s basically a Hellboy villain. There were people in their 60s reading this book on the beach patio of a Margaritaville in Nags Head, and I shed tears of joy over that thought to this day.

I won’t belabor the point like a genetic shark demon tearing the fluid from its fascist lungsacs, but I do want to stress how insane it was to see a book like White Shark in Waldenbooks in 1994. At the time, popular American fiction was dominated by authors like Tom Clancy and John Grisham, who wrote grounded adult thrillers about crime and politics, and the politics of southern criminal lawyers. Nary a shark man among them, although Nazis appeared more than once. Nazis were similar to vampires in the '90s; they’d pop up here and there like withered old monsters to add a campfire twist to books sold at airport newsstands. (Unlike today, where they pop up to buy all the newsstands and crash the planes for being too woke.) Peter Benchley boldly wrote a follow-up to Jaws where the shark itself is a surprise Nazi. That takes the kind of self-confidence most doctors would write off as “alcoholism.” Also, Jaws exists in the universe of White Shark. Which means Peter Benchley exists in the universe of White Shark. He technically did a Dark Tower before Stephen King.

White Shark was a critical and commercial failure, despite me owning both the hardcover and audiobook versions. Benchley’s publishers even tried republishing it in 1997 as Creature to coincide with the release of the miniseries adaptation, which made the title change and removed all the Nazi stuff from the story, presumably because miniseries star Craig T. Nelson kept asking them to add more. The book never saw another printing after that, but there are still plenty of unsold copies from the '90s floating around like so much flotsam. Even after 30 years, the demand for White Shark has yet to meet the supply. I’ve collected a potpourri of my favorite moments below, so you don’t have to.

Here we learn Der Weisse Hai has been living off thousands of shrimp for the past 50 years, and has been busily shelling each and every one before eating them, like a shark ogre fussing with the kids’ menu:

Webber is a NatGeo photographer who finds Der Weisse Hai in a gigantic steampunk coffin sealed with a tiny Swastika button. The box isn’t locked or anything. Just push the swastika, chief:

Webber does not survive this bout of curiosity, but I immediately feel bad about questioning the lock. Der Weisse Hai had to be able to get in and out to shell its shrimp, and it couldn’t very well do that if the box was sealed, now could it? Those Nazi doctors thought of everything. Anyway, in the next scene we meet Simon Chase the ass-crushing marine biologist:

Chase was a thrusting fuck stallion in his younger years, which were only about a decade ago because he’s impossibly in his early thirties:

He’s super divorced, because Peter Benchley’s fiction did not trust women.

But don’t worry! Chase is still a salt-of-the-earth guy, even though he owns a boat, a private island, and his own research institute. Tragically, we learn he has been living as an undiagnosed shark pervert for most of his life:

He spends most of the story obsessed with a pregnant great white after glimpsing its fat shark knuckle:

He is ready to *risk everything* for this shark; later on he free-dives next to it like Tom Jane in Deep Blue Sea to cut it free from a fishing line. But Chase doesn’t let his shark perversion stand in the way of his true passion - bitching about conservation laws that make it harder to film whales for money:

Chase’s other passion is his hot son Max, whom he hasn’t seen in 8 years:

Max is falling over himself to earn his father’s love, which Chase will deny him for the entire novel. Also, Benchley adorably tries to assure us that kids love Jaws just as much as Jurassic Park:

We also meet Chase’s best friend Tall Man Palmer, the glistening avatar of colonizer pornography:

Tall Man is a Pequat Native American who constantly makes self-deprecating jokes about the genocide of his people, because this is a book written by a white man in the nineties:

If you’re wondering whether Tall Man has any mystical powers, why are you even asking when you know the answer is “animal whisperer”:

And if you’re curious whether Tall Man has a Billy from Predator showdown with Der Weisse Hai, I must ask you once again why you’re even questioning Peter Benchley, monarch of the sea?

Despite being 12 years old, Max shares his father’s distrust of women. He hates girls who use their looks as a “weapon” and doesn’t like it when they make him feel stupid by reading books in his presence. Luckily he meets a deaf girl named Elizabeth who can’t say much and is literally, in Benchley’s own words, “hot but doesn’t know it.”

In one scene, both Max and Benchley seem completely immune to the idea that Elizabeth might dress herself on purpose:

Elizabeth is lightly psychic and has super senses, because Benchley comes from the sheltered white kid school of storytelling in which social justice reparations are paid by bestowing magical powers onto marginalized groups:

She flees like a raccoon the first time she sees Chase, because she can sense his divorced aura with her heightened abilities:

Chase is struggling to keep his institute afloat (ha ha!), so he rents the island out to a fellow marine biologist named Dr. Amanda Macy. We meet Dr. Macy in the novel’s single most embarrassing page:

Amanda makes the mistake of mentioning her Ph.D. in front of Chase and immediately apologizes to him. Now we see where Max gets it!

During the town’s annual Blessing of the Fleet (basically the Fourth of July scene from Jaws, because Peter Benchley wrote one book), a teenage girl all but feeds her two-year-old babysitting charge to the shark man. So extreme is her negligence (and Benchley’s disdain for women as caregivers) that a random garbageman tries to intervene, only to be reminded that the girl could fabricate an assault charge and send him to jail:

Again, Peter Benchley would like us to believe that the person with the least power in this scene is the adult male garbageman, and not the infant, whom Benchley doesn’t even bother to identify. I’m serious, he calls the kid “it”:

Chase and Tall Man meet an aging Holocaust survivor named Jacob Franks, because Peter Benchley has only read one book about the Holocaust. Franks was forced to work with Nazi scientists to create Der Weisse Hai and regrets it to this day, which is kind of hilarious. He has Oppenheimer-level angst over creating a single fish man who lived in a box at the bottom of the ocean and shelled shrimp for five decades. Franks struggles with an oxygen mask, which we’re left to assume is just a result of his extreme age, but then he reveals a set of crudely vivisected gills carved into his neck, because Peter Benchley is the monarch of the ocean. Chase presumably has to conceal his erection.

Don’t worry, we will never see Franks again. His son appears in one sentence of the final chapter to wordlessly hand Chase a framed photograph of a hideous war crime. It’s my favorite moment of the entire book.

Like Rudi Franks, I shall leave you with a troubling thought. Benchley worked for the White House under president Lyndon B. Johnson. (The B is short for Big.) He later wrote a spy fiction novel titled Q Clearance, based on his time working for the government, but that book is no longer in print. White Shark is also no longer in print. Peter Benchley died in 2006, allegedly, nearly two decades before the QAnon conspiracy destroyed America. There’s a nonzero chance Facebook told your grandmother Peter Benchley is still alive and that the events of White Shark are true.

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is busy splicing shark legs onto mailboxes. Check out their Supernatural watchalong Him-Boos, and their improv mockumentary BADICAL, about the raddest fighting game (n)ever made.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Brandon Garlock, who would also risk everything for a shark after glimpsing its fat shark knuckle.

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