lochZachary Wallace is a marine  biologist hunting for giant squid in the Sargasso Sea.  He and his team find the giant squid, plus a little something extra, and their sub is torn apart and he nearly doesn’t survive the drowning.  This is Zachary’s time drowning, the first time was seventeen years early in Loch Ness; Zachary is originally from Scotland, but moved to the US with his American mother after she divorced his scoundrel dad, Angus.

After the Sargasso incident, Zach’s girlfriend leaves him, he is fired from his job, and now has a fear of water.  He becomes a drunk, and ultimately loses all direction in his life.  Luckily, back in Scotland, his father is accused of murder and requests Zachary to be at his side.  Zachary goes but finds his dad’s defense is that the Loch Ness Monster committed the murder, not him.  It might be true since a lot of people are dying on Loch Ness, and something big and angry is stalking its waters.

Steve Alten’s The Loch is a monster movie crossed with a Lifetime Movie of the Week.  This story brims with overwrought melodrama to the point I was laughing at the seriousness.  Everyone here seems to have a troubled life, bad childhoods, and then the reconcilliations with the neglectful fathers.  Blah blah blah blah.  Zachary Wallace drowns three times in this story.  A little much.


The Loch isn’t as fun as it should be, or as atmospheric as it wants to be.  The mystery isn’t compelling, or mysterious, or interesting, and all the Scotish brogues are just distracting and irritating.  There’s no real excitement here, and it’s about two hundred pages too long.

A couple of the monster scenes are good, but we are treated to one boat capsizing, then another, then people in the water in danger, then more people in the water in danger.  By the time of the final showdown, I just didn’t care anymore, I just wanted to have the book finished and over with.  I could have put the book down and been done with, but I thought for the sake of the review, I’d read it all the way through so you wouldn’t have to, so that I knew for sure I could tell all of you out there:  read something else besides The Loch.  It’s really not good.

1.5 out of 5
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