Jaws (franchise) about a great white shark terrorizing a beach resort. After various revisions and rewrites, Benchley delivered his final draft in January 1973. The title was not decided until shortly before the book went to print. Benchley says that he had spent months thinking of titles, many of which he calls "pretentious" such as "The Stillness in the Water" and "Leviathan Rising". Benchley regarded other ideas, such as "The Jaws of Death" and "The Jaws of Leviathan", as "melodramatic, weird, or pretentious." According to Benchley, the novel still did not have a title until twenty minutes before production of the book.
Jaws (novel) plot. It's boring, pointless, listless; if there's a trite turn to make, "Jaws" will make that turn." An article in "The Listener" criticized the plot, stating the "novel only has bite, so to say, at feed time," and these scenes are "naïve attempts at whipping along a flagging story-line." Andrew Bergman of "The New York Times Book Review" felt that despite the book serving as "fluid entertainment", "passages of hollow portentousness creep in" while poor scene "connections [and] stark manipulations impair the narrative." Nevertheless, some reviewers found "Jaws"'s description of the shark attacks entertaining. John Spurling of the "New Statesman"