If you know anything about this book, you know the one reason why I'm reviewing it.
Follows the plot of the movie, really. Ellen Brody is the widow of Sheriff Martin Brody, who has ostensibly died of a heart attack after fighting a couple of different sharks off Amity Island. Their son Michael has also previously had shark trouble, and he's retired to the Caribbean to work on some marine research. Now it's Sean Brody's time to face the shark...an encounter he does not survive. A grief-stricken Ellen is starting to believe, perhaps rightfully so, that sharks have a thing for her family specifically, and so she goes south to join Michael and get away from Amity. She ends up meeting Hoagy Carmichael (who is immediately recognizable as Michael Caine's character even to people who haven't seen the movie), a pilot who will prove instrumental in her defeating the shark. And, inevitably, the shark is defeated. This is a simple paperback tale of good versus evil, so there's relatively little nuance to the plot presented.
With one exception.
There is a significant deviation from the film version of Jaws: The Revenge, aside from the addition of a Haitian cocaine-smuggling subplot which I don't remember going anywhere beyond filling pages. We finally learn why the Brody family has been beset by so many sharks: VOODOO, MOTHERFUCKER. Yep! Years ago, before the events of Jaws, Martin Brody threw a voodoo charm belonging to a houngan named Papa Jacques into the ocean, pissing Papa Jacques off enough to put a curse on Martin and his whole family. Every shark that has attacked Amity Island thus far has been a spirit-shark pulled from Papa Jacques' soul. I can't make this up, nor can I envision the writing process. It must have been agony for Searls, having to turn the worst Jaws movie into a 300+ page novel...adding the cocaine subplot ought to have been enough but there was still something missing. In a postmodern moment his mind must have chanced upon deconstructing the whole thing and asking why there were four sharks haunting a specific family on the East Coast over a twelve year period. Really, a curse does seem to be the only way to explain the bad luck of the Brodys. You can almost overlook the fact that this plot explanation is born of the fact that Jaws shouldn't have had sequels in the first place. If there had just been one shark attack, or hell, even just two, it wouldn't have been suspicious. But Jaws 3D and Jaws: The Revenge bumped up the shark vengeance count on the Brodys to four, and then you do sort of need a reason. Not like anyone would care.
Unifying the four Jaws films like this raises a particular problem. Papa Jacques is now the main villain of the Jaws series, and Hank Searls must make that a believable thing. He doesn't. Papa Jacques barely gets dialogue--he just lurks around being sinister-looking. (There's a lot of racist dialogue focusing on his black skin, usually with the apparent intent being that makes him more sinister-looking.) It's hard to get menace out of a character who is responsible for a number of deaths because he had his magic charm thrown in the water; even if he does possess real mystical powers, that's such a petty grudge that it undercuts any menace he could present as a powerful wizard type. If Jacques was a charismatic character, with a large following and presence a la Thulsa Doom from the Schwarzenegger Conan, then I could suspend my disbelief, but that would still change Jaws: The Revenge into a different story entirely--either a Mansonsploitation-style thriller, or some kind of fantasy story. If you take this novel as canon, you now have to believe that magic exists in the Jawsverse. Indeed, it is the entire impetus for the plot of all the movies.
In case you didn't click that TV Tropes link above, this book is the Trope Namer for the Voodoo Shark: when a plot hole is "patched" by an even bigger plothole, like, say, casually revealing that magic exists in the setting of Jaws. This is the one thing that keeps this book memorable at all. Otherwise, it is the sort of book that I really hate reading, which is the airport novel. This is the sort of thing I could get for four bucks off the "bookshelf" at the local grocery store. I'm getting too snobby for my own good here, but this is an overly dry book that is "realistic" because it uses a lot of technical terms. Ooh, you know what the different parts of a boat are called. That makes your story so much more compelling, and it totally makes me forget your characters are planks of wood.
Read this book, if you must, for the same reason I did, which is voodoo sharks. Otherwise, you'll probably just be lost in a sea of endless do-nothing subplots while a shark creeps around semi-ominously.
P.S. Expect Peter Benchley's original Jaws novel on the site at some point, too. I've heard it's--how to phrase this nicely--kind of a turd. Marvelous!
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