The use of a giant squid as a mysterious source of danger has been a standard device for the novelist for over a hundred years. Homer in The Odyssey had made the Scylla a mythical monster, and the actual creature is still not well known. Victor Hugo used it in an episode of his Les Travailleurs de la Mer (1866; The Workers of the Sea), and four years later Jules Verne would put one in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870; see separate entry). In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the giant squid is also a villain, but it seems to be a mindless one, unlike Benchley's beast.