The best animal attack novels

Known mostly from the popular Steven Spielberg film of the same name, the novel Jaws is likewise a classic that shouldn’t be missed. As animal attack stories go, it’d be hard to find a creature more terrifying than a great white shark. Described in thrilling and intense detail, Jaws pulls the reader in like a torn bag of chum. Although what really separates Jaws from the other garden-variety animal attack stories are the corrupt human characters whose negligence cause the shark menace to grow worse. Take the venal mayor whose mafia ties prevent him from closing the beaches. Or the love affair that complicates the protagonists’ journey. Jaws shows the only thing worse than a monster in the sea are the ones staring back in the mirror.     

What if rats went from carrying diseases to being a plague themselves? This is the premise Herbert explores in his seminal animal attack novel. The only thing worse than one monster is thousands of them attacking all at once. Herbert’s vivid descriptions of the rats and their attacks mirror the cold and vicious setting of the East London suburbs. Poverty and neglect provide the perfect breeding ground for these man-eating rats. Herbert uniquely focuses upon English society’s underbelly—vagrants, alcoholics, and other undesirables—as the victims, allowing proper society to turn a blind eye to the growing rat threat. Part horror novel and part social critique, The Rats broke every rule to horror fiction up to that point and cemented animal attack stories as a classic horror trope.

No horror list would be complete without a Stephen King entry, and of all his animal attack stories Cujo still reigns supreme. Set in small-town Maine, King unmasks the rotten underbelly of an archetypical American town. In classic King fashion, a childhood dream is turned into a nightmare when a friendly Saint Bernard dog, Cujo, is bitten by a rabid bat and transforms into a vicious monster. The story revolves around a broken family still reeling from the mother’s affair. When the father disappears to deal with a corporate scandal, the family is further threatened as Cujo traps the mother and her son inside a hot car. Both physical and phycological threats drive the heart of this intense book. A gruesome gut punch, King delivers an unforgettable page-turning horror.

Twisting childhood dreams into nightmares is a typical horror trope, yet none do it with such caliber as Crichton’s Jurassic Park. Imagine a child’s joy visiting a theme park filled with their favorite dinosaurs…and their terror as these creatures escape to wreak havoc. Blending horror with a pop novel style, Jurassic Park treads the line between cultural critique and commerciality with ease. The characters lack the serious pathos of the other stories on this list, but they certainly aren’t boring. This rapid-paced tale is impossible to put down as the tension builds with dinosaur-chomping action. As a critique of modern science, such as DNA and cloning, the novel explores moral and ethical challenges of our era. But again, the real draw are the towering cold-blooded lizards.

Some animal attack stories are terrifying, some are social critiques, and some are just plain gross-out ridiculous fun. Slugs by Shaun Hutson is the latter—a trashy pulp novel filled with a roller-coaster of shock entertainment. As an animal to fear, slugs aren’t really that scary, but boy are they gross. Hutson delivers on this premise through shocking scenes of descriptive gore. If popped eyeballs and ripped flesh are your thing, Slugs delivers in troves. Do not take anything in this book seriously—the plot is absurd, the characters shallow, and the sex stuff sounds like it was written by a middle-school virgin, however, it’s impossible to put down. There’s no social commentary or character growth, only pulpy escapist fantasy. And sometimes that’s exactly what you need.