The Raw Shark Texts Negatives
A field guide to the lost, missing and recovered unchapters of Steven Hall’s cult novel.
A field guide to the lost, missing and recovered Negatives of Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts.
Steven Hall’s cult novel did not end between its covers. For every chapter, there is also an unchapter — a Negative — scattered through editions, websites, old forums, real-world hiding places and, in some cases, oblivion. This guide maps fun additions to the book for collectors to look out for.
Warning: This page contains spoilers for the book.
Introduction
There are books that contain secrets, and then there are books whose secrets have leaked out of them.
Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts is already a novel about leakage: memory leaking out of a life; language behaving like water; grief returning in fragments; a shark made not of flesh but of meaning, swimming through the currents of thought and communication. But the printed novel is not the whole book.
Somewhere outside it — in old forums, foreign editions, special editions, dead websites, physical hiding places and reader memory — there is another version of The Raw Shark Texts. Hall calls these pieces the Negatives. The author’s official index explains the premise simply: for every chapter in the novel, there is an unchapter, a negative, somewhere beyond the book’s covers. Some are several pages long, some are only a few lines, some went online, some went into the real world, and many are now lost.
Best place to start: The Canons paperback is a practical starting point because it’s easily accessible. If you want to “own” a Negative, check out the edition guide: the Goldsboro slipcased edition came with an insert containing N6, the Brazilian Portuguese edition contains N8, the Hebrew edition contains N11, and several editions contain the Undex.
Spoilers and secrets ahead. If you haven’t read The Raw Shark Texts yet, consider pausing here. Go and let the book swallow you first — then come back for the hidden chapters, edition clues, strange fish, and all the extra fun waiting beneath the surface.
What are the Negatives?
A Negative is an unchapter: a counterpart, reflection or missing piece attached to one of the 36 chapters of The Raw Shark Texts. In the context of the novel, a negative is not only an image reversed, it’s also a trace of something that was present but is no longer directly visible.
In photographic terms, a negative is not the final picture, but it contains the information from which another picture can be made. The unchapter Negatives work the same way. Some illuminate events in the novel. Some extend its mythology. Some complicate a character. Some behave like indexes, bestiaries or conceptual artefacts. Others exist only as a title, a clue in the Undex, or a memory from a reader forum. Their instability is not incidental — The Raw Shark Texts is a book about memory, and the Negative archive behaves similarly: it’s fragmentary, unreliable, and occasionally recovered only in partial flashes.
One of the fun things about this as a side project is that it invites readers act like Eric Sanderson. To read the novel is to follow a man piecing himself together from letters, traces, instructions, maps and warnings. To read the Negatives is to do the same thing from outside the book.
The Raw Shark Archives
This guide is part of a wider Beautiful Books reconstruction of The Raw Shark Texts beyond the printed novel: the lost and found unchapters, the reader-led ARG (game) trail, and the strange conceptual fish that make up Negative 26.
ARG materials can look very much like Negatives because they share the same fictional world, characters, web traces, codes, and reader-hunt structure. Hall was involved in writing parts of the game too, but the ARG was coordinated by the publisher, so it’s more of a related layer than a set of Negatives. Where an ARG clue appears to lead to, preserve, or overlap with a confirmed or candidate Negative, I’ve noted that as part of the source trail.
Hidden Trails
An exploration of literary and musical Easter eggs in the text.
Explore Hidden Trails →
The ARG reconstruction
Websites, videos, traces and memories surrounding the original publisher-run treasure hunt game.
Follow the ARG trail →
The Encyclopaedia of Unusual Fish
An expanded visual and textual guide to the conceptual fish of Negative 26.
Read the encyclopedia →The significance of 36
The number 36 appears to be one of the book’s organising numbers, and possibly one of its still-unfinished clues.
When asked for clues in the book, the author has pointed readers toward this number directly. In a Reddit AMA, after telling a reader to look out for doorways and for how things change when Eric decides to go through them, Hall added: “What’s the significance of the number 36?”
The most obvious pattern is structural: The Raw Shark Texts has 36 chapters, and Hall’s official Negatives index, the “undex,” frames the unchapters as 36 Negatives. The UNSBN for the unspace edition can be decoded to read 36 NEGATIVES.
But 36 also appears inside the story. Eric finds an empty photo wallet with 36 missing exposures, an image of absence arranged into a countable shape. There are 36 fish pictures and negatives thrown into the shaft. The number therefore links chapters, photographs, negatives, and missing memory: all the things the novel asks readers to reconstruct from gaps.
A fractured record
The hunt for the Negatives began in the kinds of places that now feel as fragile as paper: author forums, MySpace pages, Flash websites, YouTube videos, edition-specific inserts, and reader discoveries passed from one small community to another.
Alexander J. Zawacki’s reader essay “unspace, unchapters” captures the sadness of this: the forums are dead, MySpace history has been wiped, old web pages are broken, and many of the clues seem to have vanished with the internet that hosted them.
A conventional archive wants completeness. The Raw Shark archive can never quite have it. Its missingness is not just a research problem; it mirrors the novel’s deepest subject. Eric Sanderson cannot recover the whole of himself. Readers cannot recover the whole unbook. We can make lists, compare editions, search catalogues, ask owners to check their copies — and still the water remains dark in places.
The Negatives were not discovered in isolation. Many clues were seeded in a wider web trail of forums, archived sites and reader correspondence (see Sources). I’ve also reconstructed another layer separately in the Raw Shark Texts ARG page.
Influences
Interviews with the author have revealed some of the many kinds of story behind the story: from comics, shark cinema, childhood horror, and Lovecraftian dread, to postmodern visual fiction. Some of these are explicit influences; others are better described as precedents, background currents, or useful companion reads.
Watchmen, for example, is explicit: in a reader Q&A, Hall was asked whether Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ comic influenced his approach to structure and layered storytelling in Raw Shark, and he answered “Absolutely,” adding that the Raw Shark title is itself a Rorschach reference. Jaws is an explicit cultural archetype and obvious inspiration for one section of the book. Hall has said you cannot write a shark story and pretend Jaws does not exist; the shark is as much cultural memory as monster. House of Leaves, by contrast, is more precedent than origin: Hall has said he read it, but was already working on what became The Raw Shark Texts when it appeared.
Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
A graphic novel deconstruction of the superhero archetype.
Jaws
Peter Benchley
A giant great white shark terrorizes a small resort town.
House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski
A nested labyrinthine novel about a creepy house - an ergodic classic.
The soundtrack
In a 2007 Largehearted Boy “Book Notes” essay, Steven Hall wrote about the music that shaped the writing of The Raw Shark Texts. He also mentioned there are musical puzzles in the book: song-title and lyric Easter eggs that attentive readers could track down.
The playlist also reminds us that beneath the puzzles, sharks, codes, conceptual fish and acts of typographic showmanship, the book is moved by grief. Discussing Lily Allen’s “The Littlest Things”, Hall said the emotional centre of Raw Shark was not the huge conceptual adventure, but the ordinary sadness of someone missing a lost life. He also mentioned that AiM’s “Hinterland” was so influential in tone that an early draft of the manuscript carried Hinterland as its working title.
The Negatives are part of that hinterland.
The Negatives Index
This is a working field guide to the known and suspected Negatives. It follows Steven Hall’s official index where available, and also makes use of community contributions, the Sharkive, and original research. This index includes the canonical negatives/unchapters — other candidates are discussed below.
Source note: several entries below are sourced from the Undex.
N1 — The Aquarium Fragment / Prologue
This limited edition promotional pamphlet titled The Aquarium Fragment (Prologue) was produced with HarperCollins Canada. It describes the first Eric Sanderson’s first encounter with the Ludovician. Hall’s website index links N1 through a lift to the “Aquarium.”
Read the Aquarium Fragment on Steven Hall’s site →Prelude to the Prologue →
N2 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N3 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N4.533 — The Greek Island
The Undex refers to N4.533 under the listings for “Greek Islands,” redirected from Naxos, Thera and Theia / Orpheus. It appears to be the only Negative with a decimal number — a coordinate island located somewhere in the sequence between N4 and N5. Naxos and Thera are Greek islands; Thera is also the first five letters of the title of the book. Theia and Orpheus are both names given to the hypothetical Mars-sized proto-planet in the giant-impact hypothesis.
N5 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N6 — Letter #7 / post-theft fragment
Hall confirmed that 100 copies of this negative were printed on brown envelope paper and randomly inserted into UK hardback first editions before the book’s UK release in 2007. The insert was also included in every limited slipcased edition available from Goldsboro Books.
The fragment is headed Negative 6/36 and Letter #7. It’s a letter to Eric instructing him how to steal other people’s post, expanding the survival-manual side of the novel.
N7 — Letter #158
Letter #158 is referenced in the Undex, but there is no current indication of its contents.
N8 — Letter #175 / the Brazilian Negative
Letter #175, from Eric 1 to Eric 2, is included in the Brazilian edition of The Raw Shark Texts.
The text circles around holes, inversion, inside/outside, positive/negative, confirming the idea that a negative is not merely absent but structurally meaningful.
Read Letter #175 on Steven Hall’s site →Read the translation →
N9 — Gavin the Cat
The Undex lists Gavin the Cat as N9. In the book, Ian the Cat is a red tomcat; Gavin was mentioned as his black brother but never seen.
N10 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N11 — The Clio Conversation / Hebrew edition
N11 is included in the Hebrew translation of The Raw Shark Texts and appears at the start of chapter 18. It is a tender conversation with Clio about the bodily feeling that something important has gone missing.
N12 — Deadly, I’m Yours
Deadly, I’m Yours appears in the Undex as N12. This title also appears at the start of chapter 2 in Peter Benchley’s Jaws as a fictional detective novel that Brody’s colleague Len Hendricks is reading.
N13 — The Story of Mr. Nobody
The Story of Mr. Nobody was reportedly left under a bench in Glossop and not recovered. It is presumed lost.
Source: “unspace, unchapters” →coldsteel-heart photos “The trail of Eric from Glossop to unspace” →
N14 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N15 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N16 — Ten Tickets
Hall’s current official page confirms that N16 appeared as part of the short story Ten Tickets (specifically as text number 6 within that story) in the Light Transports: A Couple of Stops anthology. The fragment is about movement, and hidden in a book that moved through trains. These books were collections of short stories designed to be read on short journeys and given away free to UK train commuters on a single day in 2006 (before The Raw Shark Texts was published) — never intended for reprint or resale. However, they were re-released as ebooks in 2023.
N17 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N18 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N19 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N20 — Torch Bulb Fragment
The Undex names a “Torch Bulb Fragment” as N20. There were various Light Bulb Fragment links on the ARG, including a notebook and video, but I assume they are intentionally named differently.
N21 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N22 — Rabbit / Shadow Fragment
The Undex lists “Rabbit” and “Shadow Fragment” under N22. Notably, the Rabbit reference in the book is in the context of “down a rabbit hole”.
N23 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N24 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N25 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N26 — The Encyclopaedia of Unusual Fish
Hall’s official page identifies N26 as The Encyclopaedia of Unusual Fish, which is referenced in the book. There are supposedly 100 entries but to date not all conceptual fish have been discovered. This Negative greatly expands the conceptual ecology of the book.
Read entries from the Encyclopaedia on Steven Hall’s site: Behemothic Newlyn →Franciscan →Serrasalmerrida →Hypsochronidae →
N27 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N28 — The Sword Hilt Fragment / Italian edition
Negative 28 appeared in the Italian edition of The Raw Shark Texts and adds two pages to the end of chapter 27. It appears the sword does not cut paper, it cuts meaning.
N29 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N30 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N31 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N32 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N33 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N34 — Unknown
No confirmed clues.
N35 — Conceptual space (Einsteinian/Tegmarkian) / Future Memory
The Undex connects N35 to both future memory and conceptual space, including Einsteinian and Tegmarkian variants. The Newtonian variant is also in the Undex but for some reason not linked to N35.
Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Max Tegmark are all visionary physicists and mathematicians who share a foundational concept: the universe operates on strict mathematical principles, and that reality boils down to informational data.
The final chapter in the book is called “Goodbye Mr Tegmark”.
N36 — The Undex
The Undex is both a Negative and a tool for finding other Negatives. Several editions contain slightly different versions of the Undex, but it’s always incomplete — some were printed onto a transparency and slipped into early UK editions, there’s an edition in the UK paperback, and the Canadian first edition contains an Undex as well.
Candidate clues and trails
These entries are not confirmed numbered Negatives. They are candidate clues, delivery mechanisms, paratextual hints, source trails, or known-but-unplaced fragments that may be part of the Negative system, but I’m not sure where they go. You can expand the images by clicking on them.
C1 — Copyright-page UNSBN / UNSNB code
The copyright page of the first edition of the book includes an UNSBN for the Unspace edition in the list of ISBNs (which are unique 13-digit identifiers used to track books) which is listed as CF01 45712 092251 9. Read as a simple alphabet code it appears to resolve as 36 NEGATIVES — by transposing C and F numbers (3rd and 6th letters of the alphabet), and the other digits into letters using A1Z26.
C2 — B2 / Book 2
B2 is linked to Steven Hall in the Undex, and is a reference to “Book 2,” which appeared later as Maxwell’s Demon (as confirmed by Hall on Instagram) — and if you liked The Raw Shark Texts, you should read this too! B2 is also connected to Undex entries for Gavin the Cat, the Quantum Machine Gun and Danielle Grayson (Greek edition). Danni Grayson and a novel named The Qwerty Machinegun both make a cameo appearance in Maxwell’s Demon.
C3 — The Gold Index
The Gold Index is mentioned in Undex-related entries for Eric Sanderson the First, Eric Sanderson the Second, Scout and Clio Aames. It should be treated less as a single known fragment and more as a research trail: a sign that some indexing apparatus around the book may exist in multiple layers.
C4 — Eva Signet
The name Eva Signet is an anagram of NEGATIVES. Hall created an Eva Signet persona on MySpace, and some Negative material was hidden on her account, including two flipbooks (see C12 and C13) and a Morse code message that when decoded led to C15. Replies on her account implied she worked closely with Mr Webster. In his Reddit AMA, Steven noted:
“Eva Signet is a strange, slippery and untrustworthy person. I would not take anything she says at face value, or have any confidence that any of the people she talks about are even real... Don’t attract her attention.”
Also interesting to note that the archive page for the negatives on his website lives at /eva/, which feels quite relevant...
C5 — Story of Ian & Gavin
The Story of Ian & Gavin appears to be an origin piece for Ian the Cat and Gavin the Cat. Note that Gavin also appears separately in the Undex as N9.
Hall has added some additional information about the cats in various forum entries. In his Reddit AMA he mentions:
“The cats are very much connected to the mirroring in the book. Ian is present in the world of Eric’s story, while Gavin is lost and mostly forgotten to him. But, at the end of Raw Shark Texts, things appear to switch ‘the view becomes the reflection, and the reflection the view’. So could that mean… if Ian is now there … Gavin is now here?”
C6 — One-off villain piece / Glossop bench piece
A “one-off villain piece” mentioned by Hall is likely the same as the Glossop bench piece: the lost Story of Mr. Nobody associated with N13.
Source: Structo Interview →Secondary report: “unspace, unchapters” →
C7 — Dust Fragment
The Dust Fragment is referenced in the book, but is not yet placed in the numbered Negative sequence.
C8 — Prelude to the Prologue
The Canadian edition included a “prelude” or introduction to The Aquarium Fragment (Prologue) that is N1. It’s supposedly written by Steven Webster, curator of the Webster Fragment Collection, and discusses repairing the pages of the fragment, and issues with reproducing the variable “Ludovician” font size of the original.
C9 — Envelope Fragment
The Envelope Fragment is referenced in the book, but is not yet placed in the numbered Negative sequence.
C10 — Message in a bottle
Hall reportedly put one Negative in a bottle and tossed it into a lake.
C11 — Netherland Square piece
Hall reportedly hid a Negative somewhere in city square in the Netherlands.
C12 — Alphabetical Dandelion Clock
A recovered flickbook from Eva Signet’s MySpace page. When posting this and C13, Eva explained:
“I found these on file in the archive computer yesterday. Apparently they were part of the Middleton-On-Sea haul in 2005 which also gave us a large (and at that time missing) chunk of Chapter 10. There are two distinct sequences. This dandelion clock which seems to be complete, and the bacteria spread, which Mr Webster believes to be incomplete. Notes on our system suggest that these may be two previously unknown flickbook sections of the novel. They have not been assigned Negative status however as there is insufficient evidence to firmly place these sequences within the book as we currently know it (the currently there is a big one, the links could be out there).”
Hall later confirmed this was a Negative via Instagram.
C13 — Bacteria Spread (incomplete?)
A recovered flickbook of a conceptual bacteria from Eva Signet’s MySpace page. This appears to belong to the conceptual-ecology side of the archive, alongside the fish, sharks and other living structures of thought.
C14 — Scientific Classifications
There’s an “Oulipan/Pereckian exercise in scientific” article by Steven Hall in the fanzine Dreams the Money Can Buy, Vol. 4 (2006) that from the description could potentially be related to the Negatives, but I haven’t been able to track down a copy so I can’t confirm any relationship.
C15 — Paul Fragment
A recovered double-encrypted scene from Eva Signet’s MySpace page: a Morse-code message decoded using the QWERTY technique from the book. See how it was decoded by Blanckien →
This fragment was identified from a request on Eva’s MySpace page to help with a Morse code sequence, which led forum users to a sequence of letters, and then a QWERTY/keyboard-shape cipher. The decoded passage begins with Eric being mistaken for Paul Railton, then moves into Eric remembering who he is, the cabinets/fragments, and the “coloured lanterns” line. Pieces of this text appear in the Serrasalmerrida / Deconstructive Piranhas and the Ludovician flipbook (see N26). Following its translation, Eva replied:
“Bloody hell, good work! Thanks to everyone at the UEC. I’ve passed this on to Mr Webster who thinks this might be a negative the Hall Archive have had for a while but wouldn’t share with us (for a change). Hopefully this will convince him to let me put more of our archive online. I’ve also asked if I can write something about the two archives and their history but as there are potential legal issues he say’s I’ll have to be VERY careful if I go for it. I’ll see what I can come up with.”
Paul is also the name of a backpacker Eric and Clio meet in Chapter 4 of the book.
C16 — The Horse Secrets
If you click on the “e” in Stunt horse in the cover image on Steven Hall’s website, you are taken to a short story about John Wayne. It mentions Otherpaul, who might be related to Paul from C15?
C17 — Danielle Grayson
Danielle Grayson is mentioned in the Undex as appearing in the Greek edition of The Raw Shark Texts but was accidentally omitted by the publisher, so she was probably a Negative that never actually appeared. She also has a cameo in Maxwell’s Demon.
C18 — WolfLion / @FirstEricSanderson
The YouTube account WolfLion at @FirstEricSanderson uploaded several Raw Shark Texts videos in 2007. It’s not clear if this is part of the Negative collection, or the ARG-adjacent infrastructure, which is where I’ve put the decoded information for now.
C19 — Ludovician Attacks Text
If you extract the text from the third part of the attack, you get something along the lines below — could these be part of a Negative?
Just over an hour ago I found myself lying face up on a bed looking at badly painted blue words written on a ceiling. The blue words said: I didn’t know who I was. ‘So, what can y___ Now, one hour later, I’m sitting in a doctor’s surgery and the doctor is trying not to frown or sigh or rub her ___ of negative body language out at all. Instead, she’s sitting up straight and still and she’s got both hands - red, ruddy, outdoorsy - firmly clamped on either end of a silver parker pen. The doctor, who’s name is Dr. R___ strong set features and cop___. She’s a large, bovine physical presence ___ cloud of dooming intelligence hanging around her. She holds my eyes for a second, maybe a second and a b___ even try out a shrug it, before she speaks. ‘Shoot.’ ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you’, she says. I start nodding the slow nod which I’m hoping will make me look together and ‘Ok’
C20 — On the Origin of Species
I’ve tried a bunch of code-cracking ideas on the page where “plant” replaces the words of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to no avail (e.g. pulling the words from the original Darwin text and trying various first letter combinations, every x recovered word or letter, Caesar shifts, etc.). If you squint I think maybe it makes the shape of a conceptual fish? But perhaps its just showing us how the text gets colonised by the luxophage and I’m way overthinking!
Editions
One reason the Negatives are so hard to track is that The Raw Shark Texts is not the same object in every edition. Some editions contain unique fragments. Some contain the Undex. Some appear to contain nothing extra.
| Cover / ID | Edition | Notes | Affiliate links |
|---|---|---|---|
|
The Raw Shark Texts English, UK first hardback |
100 brown-envelope-paper copies of N6 were randomly inserted into UK hardback editions before release. Some editions also contained a transparency of the first UK incomplete index. Additionally, this edition has green print in the Origin of Species section. | Amazon AbeBooks eBay |
|
The Raw Shark Texts English, US first hardback |
US first hardback edition, available with either blue or red cover design. | Amazon AbeBooks eBay |
|
The Raw Shark Texts English, Canadian first edition |
Contains the Canadian Undex and the Prelude to the Prologue. | Amazon AbeBooks eBay |
|
The Raw Shark Texts English, UK original paperback |
Contains the UK Undex. | Amazon AbeBooks |
|
The Raw Shark Texts English, Canons edition |
Contains the Undex and an image of the Franciscan at the end. | Amazon AbeBooks B&N Waterstones Blackwell’s |
|
The Raw Shark Texts English, Goldsboro limited slipcased edition |
Includes N6. | AbeBooks eBay |
|
Cabeça Tubarão Brazilian Portuguese |
Contains N8 / Letter 175. | Amazon AbeBooks eBay |
|
כריש זיכרון / Krish Zikaron Hebrew |
Contains N11 / Clio Conversation. | — |
|
Le memorie dello squalo Italian |
Contains N28 / Sword Hilt Fragment, adding two pages to chapter 27. | Amazon AbeBooks eBay |
Other edition information
The ebook, Australia/NZ and Turkish editions contain the UK Undex.
The Chinese edition contains an introduction by Hall not printed elsewhere, but no Negative. The Undex implied Danielle Grayson material in the Greek edition; but Hall has verified the Greek publisher had the text but did not include it.
Other checked editions currently listed without additional Negative material include Russian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, audiobook, German and French.
Do you own an unusual edition, or have a lead on a missing Negative?
If you own a translation or unusual edition of The Raw Shark Texts, look for unusual front matter, back matter, inserts, transparent sheets, altered chapter openings, extra pages, footnotes or strange indexes.
Further reading
- Steven Hall’s website. Visit the site.
- Steven Hall’s official Negatives index. Read the official catalogue.
- Structo interview with Steven Hall. Read the Structo interview.
- Reddit AMA with Steven Hall. Read the AMA.
- Literary Hub reading list by Steven Hall. Read the list.
- How to Win the Lottery interview. Open the interview.
- Alexander J. Zawacki, “unspace, unchapters.” Read the essay.
- Notes from the Sharkive. Browse the Sharkive.
- Reddit community. Browse the threads.
- Unspace Exploration Committee (Archived). Browse the archived forum.
All Negatives and related concepts remain the property of Steven Hall, author of The Raw Shark Texts. This page is a reader-created, non-commercial fan reconstruction intended to document, discuss and celebrate the book’s scattered fragments.
