Well, it's certainly no The Bloodening. Alas.

I really wanted to like this first novel by William Darrid, a paperback original with somber cover art and the perfectly '70s title of The Blooding. There are no reviews for it on Amazon, one on Goodreads, and one here, which is where I first found out about it. Interesting that one of the novels it's compared to isn't The Other or Rosemary's Baby, but James Dickey's Deliverance. Why, that's literary class right there!

Darrid, a Broadway and television producer, is a solid writer, easily bringing to life this dusty locale during WWII, and begins weaving in the plight of a rabid dog (hmm...) named Jim Dandy as it slowly wends its way through the lives and roads of Crowley Flats. But I just couldn't stick with it; I tried and tried but somehow the novel never clicked for me. And did I want to like it! Really great cover (artist unknown—update 2015: artist is Lou Feck) of a placid, stillborn town; it all just oozes dread the more you look at it, the landscape sere and foreboding, noonday evil beneath a blazing sun...

Of course "a haunting novel" is not the same thing as "a horror novel." That's not a bad thing, as it's much more a quiet, brooding kind of Western (perhaps a weak Xerox of Larry McMurtry?) and it was probably unfair to compare it to 'Salem's Lot. I simply was not captivated and put the book back on my shelf only half-read. But maybe, just maybe, some of you have read The Blooding, and you can just let me know what you thought, especially if its nerve-shattering climax haunts you forever.

June 20th, 2010 marks the 35th anniversary of the release of the movie JAWS. This post is part of Radiation-Scarred Review's 2010 SHARKATHALON, which celebrates this milestone with blog posts around the web.

Somewhere I'd gotten a hold of the Reader's Digest Condensed Books (ugh, what a concept) edition that included Jaws 2. It had these cool little illustrations - none of the shark, alas - and I must've read that thing a dozen times. It took me forever to figure out that Brody's son's name, Sean, was pronounced "Shawn" and not, of course, "Seen." But I was like 10, give me a break.

On vacation the summer of 2008 visiting my hometown, I found a copy of the original at the bookstore I used to work at, and read it pretty much in an afternoon with a rum and Coke (the only booze I could find in my mom's cupboards, left over from her Christmas fruitcake). What did I find, as an adult reader? Why, the book held up. Remarkably well. Hanks Searls' novelization is better than Peter Benchley's original 1974 novel, and better than the 1978 movie, which I feel is more of a teenage slasher flick.


This "version" of Jaws 2 is rather moody in a believable way, and much more concerned with character conflict. In the fictional town of Amity, business is down and shops are closing up. Police Chief Martin Brody broods, and can't shake the nightmare, or the Trouble, as it's vaguely referred to around town. It's as if the original great white still haunts Amity, as if its ghost still glides silently through the darkened offshore waters. But it is no ghost. The titular great white is a female this time, over 30 feet long, gravid with rapacious young.

This novelization is based on an earlier draft of the screenplay than the one produced, and Searls is a much more competent and skillful writer than Benchley; he'd already written several novels that took place at sea and dealt with marine life. As for the cover art, the movie could never hope to replicate such a dramatic image (courtesy of legendary cover artist Lou Feck). But the attacks as Searls writes them are weirdly metaphysical and existential at the same time:

He had a vision of himself, as if from above, enveloped by a dark shadow from the sea. No thought of a shark entered his consciousness: he'd offended somewhere, this was the hand of God. Mangled and torn, he knew nothing else.

It's this fatalistic quality that gives Jaws 2 a grim verisimilitude the original novel only hinted at. Any serious Jaws fan should give it a try.