Jaws: The Revenge
Hank Searls
Berkley, 1987
ISBN: 0-425-10546-6
When summer strikes, I, like a lot of people, begin to think of the water. It's hot and dry outside and cool and wet in there. Yadda, yadda, you get it but there's no sharks named Bruce in the hot and dry, so points for. Obviously Jaws started with a book by Peter Benchley who had a great idea to make people more afraid of sharks. Then Spielberg took the ball and then the movie made even more people afraid of sharks. The movie was the first summer blockbuster and summer blockbusters always seem to have to get a sequel or two. Two sequels later, Bruce the Shark had been back to Amity and over to Sea World and now it was time to take his revenge.
Hank Searls had dipped his toe in the Jaws waters before having written the novelization to Jaws 2 (or the one that’s basically the first one again, if it's been a minute since you’ve seen it) and unlike Friday the 13th Part 3:3-D the studio decided that Jaws 3-D didn’t need a 2-D novelization. So, luckily Searls knew his way around the ocean already and was ready for Jaws: The Revenge. Searls started writing under pseudonym with a mystery novel before penning TV novelizations, aircraft-centric novels and a few, you guessed it ocean-based stories. He also worked as a screenwriter for TV and TV movies and published a fair amount of work under his own name. Also, if you were ever confused by a Sega Genesis game Eccho: The Dolphin, Searls inspired the developers with his novel named The Sounding, about whale and man communicating.
But where’s the shark attacks? Based on the screenplay by Michael De Guzman (and inspired by Peter Benchley’s Jaws, as it says on the cover) Searls set to work with an early draft of the script and wrote about one shark's blind obsession with revenge. Look, I don’t think Searls had solid gold to work with, maybe not even plated gold. But what did he do? His best.
Jaws: The Revenge is a book chock-full of a lot of things (not enough shark attacks though) including spending a lot of time with the utterly detestable Brody family, sans Chief Brody who was a little cooler than rest and just died between sequels. The Brody’s have a nice trip to the Bahamas, after a shark kills
Sean Brody. The Brody’s have bad luck with sharks. What’s the rest of the book about? Um. Oh, voodoo. A lot of voodoo. See Mike Brody destroyed a magical voodoo gourd and in retaliation there's a curse put on them. Yep, perfectly normal for a shark attack book. Also, drug smuggling with the cartels. The crime angle echos Benchely’s original where the Mob plays a fairly big part, or maybe its just because it's easier to write about criminals rather than emotionless fish even out for revenge. There’s a lot of stuff to swallow in this shark-attacks-people story, even though the shark barley attacks anyone.
Here’s the thing Searls is a pretty readable writer and I kind of just zoomed over all the oddball stuff in this book. It’s only in retrospect that I question a few things. Like Mike Brody not really mentioning or seemingly remembering that he also just fought a shark at SeaWorld. But all that aside it’s a lot wilder than the movie, which is pretty bonkers itself but the book does have stuff like drug smuggling and voodoo. It’s also way too thick of a book for a novelization of a movie with this thin of a storyline.
What it all boils down to is that Searls churned out a fairly fun, crazy novel out of a fairly boring film. Not to say that the book hangs together perfectly. It desperately needed more shark action, it's a highlight every time ‘ol Bruce munches on someone. Searls is a solid writer and it really makes me wonder what he could have done with a Jaws book without it being a tie-in novel. Then I thought about pseudonym novel series from the 70s sort of like a numbered Men’s Adventure spin-off series starring Jaws and I wept for the glory of what could have been.
Oh, my favorite part? When the shark cures a man’s alcoholism. Pitch perfect.
Roy Nugen is an award-winning writer, producer, property master, plus actor. He comes from a family of musicians, engineers, wildcatters, cops, lion tamers, and carpet salesmen. Evil Dead II changed his life and he once partied with Lloyd Kaufman.
He has written 15 short films including Bag Full of Trouble, Potboiler, Handle With Care, Death in Lavender, Hole in the Ground, and the feature film Arrive Alive, many of which have played across the country. He has been the property master on 17 short films and 2 feature films.
Roy is also a prolific book reviewer and collector of vintage pulp paperback books. You can read his reviews on his blog Bloody, Spicy Books and multiple magazines including Paperback Fanatic, Hot Lead and Sleazy Reader. He has also written afterwards for novels and for various websites. He lives in the only city that once arrested L. Ron Hubbard with his wife and cats.