If you are like me, eels lack charm. Dave Barry once compared handling them to public speaking, although he conceded that he had even more horror of the latter. Reading Gunther Grass’s “The Tin Drum,” I happened to be on a particularly bumpy flight when I came to the famously gross description (quoted in Ellen Ruppel Shell’s “Slippery Beast”) of a horse’s head that had been used as eel bait, with distressing results. Ugh!

And yet, according to Shell, there are “eel people” for whom the genus Anguilla has a mystery and allure comparable to that of the Holy Grail. She even quotes one as saying they are “so cuddly.” Often these anguillaphiles have grown up fishing for eels; others have come to their obsession by more circuitous routes.

“Slippery Beast A True Crime Natural History, with Eels” by Ellen Ruppel Shell. Abrams Press, 2024; 291 pages. $28

Shell is a prize-winning journalist and professor emeritus of science journalism at Boston University. Before starting to research her fascinating book, encapsulated in the subtitle as “A True Crime Natural History, With Eels,” she had had minimal contact with eels. In fact, her relationship with nature as a whole was “best described as an uneasy truce built on a shaky foundation of fear.”

A part-time resident of Bremen on the Pemaquid Peninsula, Shell starts and ends her story in Maine. In between she ranges over just about every continent — they all have eels, except Antarctica —covering their paleontological history, natural history, scientific history. And what we might call gastro-history.

Japan, where eels are of huge cultural and gastronomic importance, leads the world’s eel consumption by large margins. So far it has proved impossible to breed eels in captivity, so the next best thing is to catch them young, as elvers, and grow them in farms. This method has the advantage that they taste better and do not contain dangerous pollutants. With the local species in decline, Japanese dealers were already looking for a new source of eels from abroad, including Maine, which is one of only two states that have a legal elver fishery.

For years it was a family enterprise for a few local people. Then two unrelated events on the other side of both large oceans caused the price of elvers to skyrocket. In 2010, the EU banned the export of European eels. A year later, the most powerful earthquake ever in Japan (which ruptured the Fukushima nuclear plant) shut down Japan’s eel fishery. “Almost overnight,” writes Shell, “the sleepy, creepy elver fishery burst into a gold rush.”

The new industry took place in the dark, in isolated places, and with mind-blowing financial stakes transacted on the spot with tens of thousands of dollars in cash. In 2012, the landing price was $1,866.72 per pound of elvers. Under such circumstances, the unwary fisherman might have his nets cut, while the apparently unlimited supply was a constant temptation to exceed Maine’s quotas.

The stories Shell gleaned from local “eel people”— including the acknowledged “Kingpin,” who did a short spell in jail for trafficking in poached eels — bring the ramifications of this sudden injection of money to exciting life, more than justifying her title’s “True Crime.”

The “Natural History” of the eel is every bit as compelling. Two hundred million years old, the fish survived the asteroid that extinguished three-quarters of the Earth’s plants and animals, went with the flow of continents and super-continents and stuck out the ice ages. In the process it developed a truly extraordinary life cycle.

Hatched from eggs laid in the floating seaweed masses of the Sargasso Sea, the larvae drift up the Gulf Stream. At the continental shelf, they become glass eels (transparent, as the name implies), then, approaching the brackish waters of an estuary, elvers. Swimming inland up rivers and streams, they turn into yellow eels and await (for years) sexual maturity. Finally, the black and silver fish we think of as eels begin their long return journey to the Sargasso Sea, where although “shriveled to puckered husks” they mate before dying. Amazingly, this has never been seen in the wild.

Shell describes what we know about eels and what we still don’t with infectious wonder. Since Aristotle, scientists and philosophers have been trying to penetrate their life history, and she canters impressively through the centuries of Italian and German natural historians who have devoted themselves to the riddle of the eel. Freud did his (small) bit; Rachel Carson’s first book was about eels. The book ends back in Maine, where an energetic woman is using the state’s elvers to prime America’s first sustainable eel farm.

All of this, and much more, is told in clear, easy-going prose. Just occasionally I found Shell’s jocularity a bit too cute or strained. But that is a small nit to pick compared to the prodigious feat of tracking down facts, figures and folk related to eels. Somewhere along the way, the nature-wary journalist concluded that “no living creature is more remarkable.” “Slippery Beast” will convince you that she is right.

Thomas Urquhart is the author of “For the Beauty of the Earth,” and “Up for Grabs! Timber Pirates, Lumber Barons and the Battles Over Maine’s Public Lands.”