Squid
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
In myths and legends, squids are portrayed as fearsome sea-monsters, lurking in the watery deeps waiting to devour humans. Even as modern science has tried to turn those monsters of the deep into unremarkable calamari, squids continue to dominate the nightmares of the Western imagination. Taking inspiration from early weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, modern writers such as Jeff VanderMeer depict squids as the absolute Other of human civilization, while non-Western poets such as Daren Kamali depict squids as anything but threats. In Squid, Martin Wallen traces the many different ways humans have thought about and pictured this predatory mollusk: as guardians, harbingers of environmental collapse, or an untapped resource to be exploited. No matter how we have perceived them, squids have always gazed back at us, unblinking, from the dark.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wallen (Fox), an Oklahoma State University professor emeritus of English, takes an educational but dry look at squids, in reality and fiction. Aiming for more than a "simple factual account" of the animal, he discusses both the scientific insights of marine biologists and, less successfully, exaggerated depictions perpetuated in the arts and folklore. The discussions of squids' diet (they "prey on almost anything that does not eat them first") and their "highly aggressive hunting behaviour" are especially intriguing. In later chapters, Wallen deals with representations of squid in literature. This begins well, with Wallen tracing the human tendency to see squid as monstrous figures back to early examples such as "the primordial squid monster" Scylla in Homer's Odyssey and the fearsome Kraken that appears in the Norse text King's Mirror (circa 1250). However, he bogs down in a welter of references to almost any squidlike creature imaginable and in abstruse reflections, such as that "in our scientific era, a direct encounter with Kraken can only be terrifying as the realization that the apocalypse is not a myth." Despite some fascinating passages, this uneven treatment will leave readers wanting. With color illus. and photos.
