Steven Hall

Hall baits a sharp hook and angles for fame

Before you even crack open British author Steven Hall’s wildly inventive and occasionally uneven first novel, you’ve got to get your mouth around its tongue twister of a title. The Raw Shark Texts pronounces like some sort of lingual Rorschach test, that series of blurry ink-blot diptychs that psychiatrists occasionally use to see deep into your secret soul. One Rorschach subject sees a butterfly; another sees a skull. Hall’s book is a bit of the same, a wavery, shifting, sometimes scary world built on ideas—now you see ’em, now you don’t.

We meet Eric Sanderson as he wakes up on the bedroom floor of an unfamiliar flat, the victim of a raging case of amnesia. Can’t remember anything. Can’t remember anyone. He’s gasping for air, as though he’s been choked. As he recovers, seeks equilibrium, the very bad news filters through.

I felt that prickling horror, the one that comes when you realize the extent of something bad—if you’re dangerously lost or you’ve made some terrible mistake—the reality of the situation creeping through the back of your head like a pantomime Dracula.

That frightening.

It’s familiar stuff these days, especially in cinema, what with Memento, The Matrix and related rip-offs chumming the same waters. But don’t fall for those easy associations. That’s not where this book is going. In fact, if you can carry a tune at all, you’d be well-served to hum that terrifying two-note cadence from Jaws the second you dive into this book. Hall is exploring deep waters here, and they’re shark-infested. Literally.

Eric searches the apartment and finds a letter he wrote to himself. It leads him to Dr. Randle, a therapist who explains that she’s been treating Eric for several years. Ever since Eric witnessed the drowning death of his girlfriend, Clio, on a holiday in Greece, he’s been the victim of a rare and recurring dissociative disorder. Dr. Randle, who has no cure and doesn’t offer Eric much hope, warns him not to open any of the mysterious packages that arrive daily at his apartment. He’s terrified—this is his 11th bout of amnesia—so he obeys.

But then, in one of the tale’s first strange twists, Eric’s living-room floor opens up one night as he’s watching TV, evaporates and turns into open ocean. There, Eric is attacked by a massive shark. Not just any shark, but a Ludovician—a thought shark that “feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self.” Let it get to you and you’re gone, sucked right off the planet into eternal oblivion. Eric escapes—barely—and whatever is in those mysterious packages becomes his only hope for survival. And soon enough, he’s off on a quest for answers.