Thanks to TheKingofKnots for suggesting I add Steve Alten’s The Loch to the annals of Nessie lore. I won’t say it’s quite Monty Python, but there’s plenty of silliness, along with a solid ration of blood, gore, and generational trauma.
Alten’s book was published in 2005, after the Surgeon’s Photo was proved to be a hoax. It mentions the Ted Danson film Loch Ness, and takes a fair bit of inspiration from it, too. Protagonist Zach Wallace is a severely down-on-his-luck academic, a marine biologist who loses his job and just about everything else after a research expedition goes drastically wrong. He set out to find the biggest of all the giant squid, and succeeded, but his department head grabbed all the credit and left Zach with the blame for destroying expensive equipment and nearly dying in the process.
Zach has an interesting history. He was born in Scotland and his estranged father still lives there. At age nine he nearly died in Loch Ness, and he still has the scars from the ordeal, both physical and mental.
His search for the squid adds another layer of both, and leaves him with a water phobia. He comes to believe that the two events are related; that the monster that attacked him in the Sargasso Sea is connected with the one that he can’t quite remember in Loch Ness. Weirder yet, he believes he’s found the source of the Bloop, a loud and eerie noise first detected in the ocean in 1997.
It’s an animal. A monster. He thinks he knows what it is. (Actually, years after the novel was published, the Bloop was identified as the sound of glaciers calving or ice scraping the sea floor.)
Just as he hits bottom, he’s summoned back to Scotland by the father he hasn’t seen in seventeen years. Angus Wallace is being tried for murder, and he wants to see his son again.
The last thing Zach wants to be associated with is either his father or the Loch Ness Monster. He ends up deep in it on both counts. Angus claims that the man he’s accused of murdering was killed by Nessie. This causes a furor, and sets Zach off on a wild ride around, over, and through the loch.
Alten is not a minimalist writer. He Does His Research, and he makes sure you know it. It’s all there.
He’s diligent, too. In an Author’s Note he reveals that just as he was getting ready to hand in the ms. of the novel, he found out about a new theory as to the species of the monster, and rewrote that part of the book to accommodate it. He does not name the cryptozoologist to whom he’s indebted, which is odd considering how many other sources he takes care to include, but he’s suitably and profusely grateful.
The theory he settles on is the eel theory. He ties in the life cycle of the creature, which spawns, he says, in the Sargasso Sea. Once the eggs hatch, the larval form of the eel migrates to Europe and North America. There it undergoes metamorphosis and settles in fresh water, either rivers or lakes. After some years, it reaches sexual maturity, metamorphoses again, and returns to the Sargasso Sea to mate and die.
Female eels are considerably larger than males. Alten, and presumably his source, speculates that a female who for some reason is prevented from mating and therefore dying will keep growing indefinitely—to fifty feet or more. And there’s your enormous brownish greyish slithery humpy thing that’s been seen so often in and around Loch Ness.
This theory has been debunked since The Loch was published, but it makes good fiction. Alten piles even more on top of it, turning the normally harmless Nessie into a vicious predator. Tourists, mostly Americans, are being literally shredded while camping beside the loch, and Zach himself is attacked by killer eels.
That’s not normal eel behavior. Zach discovers that the eels are being poisoned by pollution that’s leaked into the loch from oil drilling nearby. Lesions in their brains have turned them from peaceable pescatarians into savage maneaters. It doesn’t help that salmon, their normal prey, haven’t shown up in the loch this year, also thanks to pollution; the eels are starving, and they’re going after anything that moves.
So we have the weird and complex life cycle of the eel, man-made destruction of food sources, a murder mystery, and a historical mystery on top of it all. Zach and his father Angus are descendants of William Wallace, as in Braveheart. The brave heart itself is the heart of Robert the Bruce, which is supposed to have been preserved and hidden against the time when Scotland will once more be independent of England.
Also, Templars. Because why not. Back in the fourteenth century, the warrior knights built a shrine under Loch Ness for the heart of the Bruce, and trapped eels in the loch to guard it. Zach runs afoul of the blood oath of the Black Templars, a secret order within the order, who know all about the killer eels but can’t and won’t tell him what’s really going on.
It’s a mismash, but it’s entertaining. It reads as if it’s meant to be a film. The rights were sold and were in the works according to the Author’s Note, but the film never seems to have been made. I imagine it would have looked a bit like The Loch Ness Horror, with added family drama and bonus flashbacks to nine-year-old Zach and fourteenth-century Templar knights.
I kind of like that the eels have a reason for being bloodthirsty monsters; they’re not ripping people apart Just Because. There’s a bit of environmental activism there, which is fitting for a protagonist who’s a marine biologist. In addition to proving the existence of Nessie and solving the murder mystery and the mystery of the Templars, Zach uncovers political corruption and helps save the ecosystem of the loch. And, of course, salvages his career and gets the girl.
It’s a pretty good ending, and a beginning. Zach will go on to star in further adventures, which from what I can gather are just as far over the top as this one.
