It happens like this. You're paddling out to sea on your surf board. It's a sunny day with a blue sky and all that. You're feeling pretty cool with your Ron Jon swim trunks and that nasty white goo on your nose when Wham! Suddenly you're clinging to the shattered end of your board with half of one leg gone and your own entrails floating around you. As your vision begins to blur and the red surf spreads out around you wonder "what the hell just happened." Easy, shark attack.
While very rare in the real world, shark attacks are big business in the horror book/movie market. I tend to think this has a lot to do with the scantily clad, soaking wet females that tend to dominate these features. Still, no one can deny the chill of a merciless enemy rushing at you like a missile while you struggle vainly in the water.
Since this is Gory Details we're going to look at the mechanics of a shark attack and try to get to know just how it gets those strips of flesh hanging from its teeth.
First of all, sharks are bloodhounds. They can smell and follow blood in the water for miles. They are also very adept at picking up the sound or feel of thrashing in the water. Nothing brings on an attack faster than a wounded fish kicking around in pain.
Once at a potential meal, sharks tend to circle; strange behavior for a ravenous eating machine. This is because sharks are finicky eaters as we'll see below. Once the circling has been done and the shark is ready to go, the charge begins.
It is in the shark's attack that the many brilliant components of its design come to light. First of all, it is a powerful swimmer. As it turns to attack, it accelerates suddenly turning its mouthful of teeth into hundreds of arrowheads or spear tips.
As it closes on its prey its eyes roll back into protective covers and electrical sensors on either side of the nose guide its final approach, its jaw gets thrown forward so that it can be fully opened. By the time it hits its target it is chillingly perfect at driving teeth into flesh and flesh into bone. If the target of the attack is on the surface, it is often lifted completely into the air. That goes not just for twenty pound fish but also for one-hundred and seventy pound surfers as well.
On a funny side note. The electrical sensors on a shark's nose are very delicate and can be fooled. Early researchers were puzzled to find when they baited sharks up close to the boat, that they shark would close its eyes at the last second, swerve off course and jam straight into the boat. Scare the hell out of you if you were the one holding the bait over the side, wouldn't it?
As soon as contact is made, the jaws clamp shut and the shark will execute one of two moves. The twist or the shake. They are both exactly like they sound. In the twist the shark rolls over and over in the water with its prey. In the twist it rocks the victim back and forth. Both of these have the same effect, massive damage. To understand why, you need to take a look at shark teeth. They're serrated like a steak knife. When the shark rocks/rolls you, what he's really doing is bringing his collection of steak knives across your flesh, and what a collection he's got. Rather than having just two sets of teeth like humans do, sharks constantly grow new teeth throughout their life cycle. New teeth are formed on the inside of the jaw and slowly work their way out until they fall out and drift to the ocean bottom.
The upshot of this is, that the shark doesn't make a clean cut, he makes a collection of slashes the shreds of which end up hanging from his teeth.
Strangely, sharks don't attack humans all that often and usually break off the attack if they do. This is thought to be because we humans aren't very fatty like the sea lions and fish that shark normally feed on. No one really knows for sure though so there's plenty of room for horror writers to cook up secret oils or genetic code or whatever to justify his/her shark's attack on humanity.
For me, the best moment in any shark story came in the first "Jaws" movie. The shark snuck into the harbor and attacked a man severing his leg. The camera follows the leg to the ocean bottom where it flexes slightly as it hits foot first. Ooooo! What a great gross detail! That Steven Spielberg; he's about a Gore Monger and a half.
And you thought "Sharknado" was a terrible movie. Oh wait. "Sharknado" was a terrible movie. Now get out there and write.
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