Books
- Chapter 59 ("Squid") of Moby-Dick details the Pequod's encounter with a giant squid.
- Captain Nemo's submarine, the Nautilus, fights a band of seven giant squid in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In the 1954 film adaptation, there was only one giant squid, which was played by a large prop and served as the film's antagonist.
- In H. G. Wells "The Sea Raiders", a voracious swarm of giant squids (fictitiously referred to as Haploteuthis ferox) slay a total of eleven people in boats and even attack a man on shore.
- H. P. Lovecraft frequently used tentacled, squid-like monsters in his Cthulhu mythos.
- In J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the Fellowship come up against the Watcher in the Water, a monster that lurks in the waters of the Sirannon, beneath the western walls of Moria. Although Tolkien's description is vague, the creature is frequently depicted as a giant squid or kraken with varying (often exaggerated) numbers of tentacles, and appeared as such in the 2001 film.
- James Bond fights a giant squid in Ian Fleming's book, Dr. No. The scene is absent from the film adaption.
- John Wyndham's book The Kraken Wakes depicts an invasion of squid-like aliens.
- Jaws' author Peter Benchley's novel Beast features a giant squid terrorizing Bermuda. A TV movie (IMDB entry) was also made. However Benchley's description of the Beast (with clawlike teeth in the center of its suckers) more accurately describes the Colossal Squid.
- The River Moth, which flows through author Jeff VanderMeer's fictional city of Ambergris, is inhabited by giant squid. The city is named after ambergris, a substance secreted by sperm whales.
- The creature used by Ozymandias (comics) in Watchmen resembles the likeness of a squid.
- A giant squid is a key player in Michael Crichton's novel Sphere, as well as in the film version.
- A giant squid acts as a minor character in Charles Sheffield's novel The Web Between the Worlds.
- A giant squid also dwells in the lake at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series of books, and sometimes acts as a lifeguard when students swim or fall in the lake.
- In Book 27 (The Exposed) of the Animorphs book series, Rachel and Tobias morph sperm whales to find a giant squid, and then the rest of the group morphs the one squid to find the Pemalite ship.
- Arthur C. Clarke used giant squid in many of his works. In The Deep Range, a squid of exaggerated size is captured and exhibited. In the short story "Big Game Hunt", a device capable of controlling the behavior of invertebrates is used in an attempt to capture and film a giant squid. In Childhood's End, one of the characters stows away on an alien spacecraft by hiding inside a model of a giant squid battling a whale.
- The giant squid specimen currently housed in the Darwin Centre at London's Natural History Museum forms a key role in the plot of fantasy author China Miéville's 2010 novel Kraken.
- Many giant squids are mentioned in Tentacles, the sequel to Cryptid Hunters, by Roland Smith. The character of E-Wolf is hired to capture a giant squid for the Northwest Zoo and Aquarium. Smith portrays the squids as pack hunters.
- A giant squid is mentioned in the book Andrew Lost in the Deep by J. C. Greenburg. It is later confirmed to be a colossal squid
- John Logan Wright III from CP Coulter's Dalton is often referred to by the fan-base as the "Giant Squid of Ignorance."
Read more about this topic: Giant Squid In Popular Culture
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“Most books belong to the house and street only, and in the fields their leaves feel very thin. They are bare and obvious, and have no halo nor haze about them. Nature lies far and fair behind them all. But this, as it proceeds from, so it addresses, what is deepest and most abiding in man. It belongs to the noontide of the day, the midsummer of the year, and after the snows have melted, and the waters evaporated in the spring, still its truth speaks freshly to our experience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)