Jaws: The Revenge by Hank Searls

 

(pb; 1987: movie tie-in, based on Michael De Guzman’s screenplay)

From the back cover

“This time it’s personal.

“The lives of the Brody family have been devastated by a natural force.

“A force that glides, silent and unseen, beneath the ocean surface—ready to strike out with a relentless fury.

“To Ellen Brody it is evil incarnate. And it must be destroyed. Once and for all.

“Even if it costs Ellen her life.”

Review

Twelve years have passed since the events of Jaws. Martin Brody died a few years ago, a heart attack—his heart was weakened by the shock he was jolted by while electrocuting the great white shark ten years prior, in Jaws 2. Now Ellen, his wife, is a nervous wreck, especially when Sean, Ellen and Martin’s second, youngest son, goes out to remove an obstruction from the Amity harbor one December night. Then another great white, spawn of the previous two killer sharks, eats Sean, a police officer like his dad.

This spirals Ellen further into grief, fear, rage and more than a touch of craziness. She allows her eldest son Michael, a marine biologist (much to her dismay), to take her to the Whiskey Cay/Prince George Town areas in the Bahamas. The shark follows the tides (hello, El Niño) to where Ellen is—to the hysterical widower and bereft mother, it smacks of grim and terrifying destiny.

Searls’s writing, as it was with his Jaws 2 novel, is solid and cinematically visual. Unfortunately, this third book outing in the Jaws franchise* saddles the worthwhile author with a ridiculous set-up and an annoying lead protagonist (Ellen), undermining most of the thrills and other pleasures Revenge might’ve had. Revenge is also undercut by a subplot involving Papa Jacques (a voodoo priest who has a grudge against Michael Brody and a psychic link with the flesh-rending shark)—another ridiculous conceit, one that the tightly edited film (credit Michael Brown for that) eschews. The film version, keeping with franchise tradition, also cuts out the book’s Mafia B-storyline (this time it’s a subplot about pilot Hoagie Newcombe and Bahaman drug smugglers, particularly the murder-happy and over-the-top Rico Lomas).

Revenge’s climax, with its cross-cut editing (somewhat reflected in the movie), is especially well-written and gripping, despite Ellen’s hysteria, the shark’s voodoo connections, and Ellen/the film-version’s conceit that the shark followed her to the Bahamas—at least Searls tried to provide a reasonable rationale for why the shark did the latter, something the movie version barely bothered with.

If you’re looking for the bookish thrills of the two previous novels, skip Revenge, and pretend the story ended with Jaws 2.

The film version was released stateside on July 17, 1987.

 

(*There were four movies. Revenge’s film version was preceded by Jaws 3-D, 1983, which was not novelized.)