Abattoir Ocean

I’ll admit, I rolled my eyes when I saw *another* megalodon thriller—but *Abattoir Ocean* gutted my cynicism in the first 30 minutes. Phillips doesn’t waste time with slow burns; the book drops you into a corroded oil rig where the crew’s infighting is almost as dangerous as the thing circling below. The real masterstroke? The shark isn’t just big—it’s *wrong*, described with a clinical precision that makes its attacks feel like violations of physics. When it hits the rig, the audiobook’s mix of Lannor’s strained voice and the distant *thud* of metal tearing (used sparingly, but devastatingly) had me checking my headphones like a jump-scare victim. That said, the human characters occasionally feel like they’re serving the plot more than the other way around—particularly the corporate villain, whose mustache-twirling greed is a shade too broad for the otherwise grounded tone. And while Lannor’s performance is stellar, his female voices sometimes blur together in the chaos of action scenes. But these are quibbles. The final act, a desperate escape through flooded corridors with the megalodon *learning* from its prey, is one of the most inventive set pieces I’ve heard in audio horror. If you’re tired of toothless creature features, this one *bites*—hard. Just don’t listen to it while swimming.