 The super famous horror novel by Peter Benchley is so famous that I don't think I even need to describe the story to you, but if you need me to, here goes in about 30 seconds. It's the story of a sheriff in a small beach town on Long Island. A great white shark comes around and starts killing people. It's the story of the sheriff's struggle with the town leaders to close the beaches, because everyone in the town depends on the income from tourists over the summer. But the shark keeps coming back and killing people until the sheriff takes matters into his own hands and hires a crusty old shark hunter to go out in the ocean with him and kill the thing, the end. Seriously, if you don't know that story, it's like Star Wars or Wizard of Oz. You know the story, even though you've never read the book, seen the movie or whatever. This is not a book that I would have sought out unless I had been looking for unusual horror books to read. It was surprisingly good. I can see why people like reading it, and it was surprisingly sexual. The entire middle part of the book, a long middle part of the book, was devoted to Sheriff Brody's wife who was cheating on him, and she was cheating on him with the young biologists that had come in to help identify the shark, the one that was played by Richard Dreyfuss in the movie. But there's a lot of intense sexual language in there. All of that stuff was cut out of the movie, which was the right thing to do, because it lends nothing to the story. And in the book, there is more to the story of the Sheriff's fight with the town leadership to close the beaches. They are motivated by everyone's livelihood, depending on tourist income, but they're also motivated by a couple of other things, too. I'll let you discover that if you want to read it. But the real horror of this book is exactly that, the real horror. For those of you who weren't alive during the 70s, this movie came out, I think, in 75, those of you who weren't alive then don't understand what a big deal this movie was, and what effect it had on people. It changed popular culture, and it changed all of humanity in some ways, I think. This was the first movie that was called The Summer Blockbuster. It's the movie that established the idea that Hollywood is going to open their big movies during the summer, and they expect to make all their money back on their first weekend, because Jaws was the first movie that made $100 million during its first run in the cinema. But more importantly, the movie brought sharks into the forefront of people's minds. Of course, we knew what sharks were. We knew the word sharks. We knew what sharks were, but no one had ever used the phrase great white before. This is where the term great white shark became a household word, and everybody associated great white shark and the word shark with bloody horrible death. The thing that the city leaders of this small town in the book were afraid of, the beach going businesses losing money because people were afraid to come to the beach, is exactly what happened in the real world. The summer that movie came out, people stopped going to beaches, and I'm not exaggerating about that at all. Small businesses all over the United States, and I think in other parts of the world too, that depended on tourist income from beachgoers during the summer, they were going out of business left and right. That summer and the following summer, because people stopped going to the beaches, and it was because of this movie. But even worse than that, like I was saying before, it brought sharks into people's minds as being killers. So fishermen all over the world started going out every day to kill sharks, just to kill sharks. It became a thing, it became a thing that people do, and they're still doing it. That's why we have Shark Week on cable TV. It's the reason that Shark Week is so popular, and that's the only reason. It's not because people love sharks. Peter Benchley was so alarmed by this trend that he spent much of the rest of his career promoting environmentalism and trying to change people's minds about sharks, and it didn't work. Please remember to press that like button. It helps my videos get seen, and then subscribe so you can come back next time. I do science fiction, book, TV, and movie reviews all the time, and please consider becoming a patron. There's a link in the description below.