The Raw Shark Texts

The Raw Shark Texts (2007), a science fiction novel by British author Steven Hall, follows an amnesiac, Eric Sanderson, who tries to piece together his identity by finding clues he left for himself in the past. As he learns more about his past, he discovers that he has been pursued for years by a Ludovician, or “conceptual shark,” that feeds on human memories, causing the complete erasure of selfhood over time. The title is a phonetic play on the Rorschach test, or “ink-blot test,” in which a series of abstract images are presented to a patient. In theory, the patient projects onto each image an associated object with unconscious psychological meaning. Like the Rorschach test, Sanderson’s rediscovery of his “real” self is full of gaps and ambiguity. The novel mixes together different fonts, syntaxes, poetic styles, puns, and references to twenty-first-century culture to animate Sanderson’s struggle to form a coherent identity - if one ever existed at all.

The novel is split up into thirty-six chapters and thirty-six “un-chapters,” which append the main story. The un-chapters were first published in several clusters in various places on the Internet, and then incorporated into the novel’s print version. The un-chapters give the cumulative impression that Sanderson’s story of self-discovery will never be complete. At the beginning of the main story, Sanderson wakes in his bed without any memory of his identity or history. He sees a psychologist who informs him that he is in a fugue state, a dissociative psychiatric disorder in which one’s individuality inexplicably vanishes. Though he takes his diagnosis seriously at first, Sanderson soon discovers a trail of clues that claim to have been written by him in a less amnesiac state. The notes claim that Sanderson has summoned a Ludovician who is feeding on his memory, and will continue following him until he loses everything, including his most core personality traits.

The warnings in the clues are confirmed when the Ludovician attacks Sanderson. Panicking, he rushes to meet a doctor whose name appeared in a clue, Trey Fidorous. He hopes that Dr. Fidorous will give a better explanation for his situation and teach him how to defeat the Ludovician. Sanderson meanders through Britain trailing his own clues. On the way, he meets Mr. Nobody who works for a power-hungry intelligence agency called Mycroft Ward. Mr. Nobody tries to capture Sanderson, but he escapes thanks to one of Dr. Fidorous’ colleagues, Scout. Scout brings Sanderson to Dr. Fidorous via a subterranean maze of cellars and warehouses known as “un-space.” They are attracted to each other, but then Eric learns that Scout and Dr. Fidorous have taken him in only to use him to capture the Ludovician and defeat Ward.



Dr. Fidorous engineers a boat customized to hunt the Ludovician, and they set sail on a “conceptual ocean” that exists outside normal reality. They find the Ludovician and fight it until they hurl a laptop linked to the Mycroft Ward server into its jaws, killing it, and effectively destroying Ward’s human form. At the end of the novel, Scout and Sanderson decide to stay in the conceptual world. Back in Sanderson’s original world, his corpse is discovered, raising many questions as to his true fate. The Raw Shark Texts uses this notion of the existence of parallel worlds to suspend any resolution the plot might otherwise reach, suggesting that the question of Sanderson’s fate is only answerable by the protagonist himself.