Peter Benchley’s `Beast’ exciting from cover to cover

BEAST, by Peter Benchley, Random House, 350 pages, $21.

Peter Benchley’s up to his old tricks.

No, these aren’t things that go bump in the night. This is water fright again — stuff to make swimming in the safest of confines quite nerve-racking.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water … well, you know the rest of that advertising ploy. (Remember “Jaws”?)

Heck, when I read that book, I was weeks getting off the float at Branch Lake. Then, the obligatory follow-up movie deadened any interest I might have had for water sports that summer — fresh water or not.

Benchley’s latest creation is “Beast,” and it’s guaranteed excitement from cover to cover.

The author’s motivation for shark tales centered on a frightening, first-hand experience with a great white while fishing as a small boy. This time, Benchley’s villain is a giant squid — Architeuthis dux — and even though the setting is switched from the chilly waters off Nantucket to the balmy blue bays of Bermuda, the fear of this creature is as real nonetheless.

The author’s motivation for this story stems from his concern for the underwater environmental plunder in the waters of Bermuda. Though he belabors that point somewhat in the novel’s early stages, Benchley eventually gets around to telling us the believable tale of this huge creature — 80 feet long, 10 tons in weight — that somehow loses is barings and surfaces off the Bermuda coast to reek havoc on anything or anybody in its path.

Enter our hero, Whip Darling, a local fisherman, struggling to make ends meet in these sparsely populated waters. The usual signs of destruction are visible to locals: empty rafts, missing fishermen, overturned, destroyed boats.

The storyline becomes secondary here to Benchley’s capacity to induce fear in his readers. This squid is a real killer. You’ll believe it, and along with Darling, you’ll chase the beast, hoping not only to end its reign of ammonia-spewing terror (I’m serious), but to also catch a glimpse of this phenomenon of nature.

This one starts slowly, but works the waters into a frenzy, and by the book’s conclusion, readers will be showering instead of bathing for at least a couple of weeks anyway.

The author, who hails from one of America’s most prolific writing families, combines a thorough knowledge of ocean life with a real talent for plot buildup to create a climax that I won’t spoil for you here.

The ideal reading spot for this one would be somewhere along the coast — an idyllic little place where you could set a lawn chair down, hang one foot in the ocean water, and read. You might cast a wary eye across the horizon just in case, and if you smell the faint scent of ammonia on the breeze, take my advice, head for shore.

Ron Brown is a free-lance writer who resides in Bangor.