“Imagine a shark as big as two Greyhound buses, with a jaw wide enough to eat an African elephant in two gi-normous [sic] bites, and you have Meg.” I was reeling out of the university library, exam panic biting at my heels, and Steve Alten’s giant prehistoric shark was exactly what I needed. Carcharodon megalodon, is a “70-foot, 70,000-pound prehistoric cousin of the great white shark,” he writes – the perfect antidote to the classics of English literature.

This blissfully jacketed, utterly insane novel opens – joyously – with a T rex being eaten by the giant shark, before flash-forwarding to the paleontologist Jonas (of course) Taylor, and his discovery of a murderous megalodon that has been trapped in the depths of the Mariana Trench for all those years.

The book is horribly written, and the science is just as dire – as the LA Times points out in a hilarious review that called it an “outrageously awful book, crammed with egregious errors of fact and stuffed to the gills with writing so terrible that it would insult the intelligence of a sea cucumber”.

But … it’s about a giant prehistoric shark! I may have skimmed the pages a little until I got to the bits with the shark attacks, but after pursuing it to its breathless climax, I spent many happy hours online looking up the megalodon.

I may not have gone so far as to read Alten’s entire series of Meg books, but I used to have of a thing for monster and dinosaur novels, whether it was Peter Benchley (Jaws, obviously, but also Beast, a giant squid horror fest which inspired some brilliant teenage poetry from me), or Jurassic Park. Then there’s Anne McCaffrey’s Dinosaur Planet books, or Jane Gaskell’s Cija. Far more skilfully done than the likes of Benchley or Alten or Crichton, these are probably some of my favourite books ever, partly because of the world Gaskell has imagined, where a few dinosaurs still roam a prehistoric South America, and where its heroine Cija rides a giant terror bird.

But as news breaks that a movie version of Meg, which has “been in development for two decades” is finally going to hit our screens, I realise I’ve not read a proper, bonkers monster book for years. Summer is icumen in, Jurassic World is in the multiplex, so what leviathan should I turn to? Post your suggestions – giant crocs, snakes, sharks or squids welcome – below.