It's a weird top ten list, composed almost entirely of books I don't want to read and books I didn't think were very good.

So it wasn't Wallace that led me to Alligator but it's not easy to encounter Katz's novel without also picking up this factoid.

What about Alligator? For its publisher it was probably one of many post-Jaws works and you could make a case for it. The book opens with the giant alligator killing two men in deftly gory prose.

But the alligator isn't visible for most of the story, which is really about hard-nosed, rich, powerful, self-made tycoon Rye Whitman who nurses secret tortures and traumas, and teenaged Everglades swamp guide Lee Ferris, who might be Whitman's illegitimate son.

A big hunting party sets into the swamp only to be thoroughly pummelled by rapids and then a hurricane. (One unlucky fellow gets impaled by a tree branch.)

It's at this point that a "man against nature" theme which has been threaded through the book since the beginning, asserts itself quite strongly.

As Rye and Lee continue after the alligator they and their environment seem to revert to a prehistoric time, a world once populated by giant reptiles and no people.

There's even some kind of bond between these two humans and the alligator that they're obsessively pursuing. They even have an airboat called a Saurian, just so you won't miss it.

Is this like Moby Dick as has been suggested? I don't know but I kind of doubt it.

It really is a good book with very good writing—good enough that I found the characters' ordeal to be exhausting to read about. The closer I got to the end, the less of it I could read in one sitting. A handful of pages would wipe me out.

As I neared the end I started to worry that there couldn't possibly be a satisfying ending to this book and that turned out to be a fairly accurate prediction. The ending isn't a disaster but it is anticlimactic.

Another criticism concerns a character named Trancas, who comes out of nowhere and is extremely colorful but also contrived and unbelievable. I suspect he's shoe-horned in here both as a solution to a problem but also to make a point about society and civilization and human sanity/insanity and perhaps even materialism and capitalism and, you know, maybe that's also a problem, sicne there's already a lot going on in this book already

But definitely read it for the brilliant descriptive writing, the ruthless pacing and cask-strength suspense.

The first line is "It was a primeval night, dark and calm".