Shark People : the urge to submerge (ePub)

It's 2001 and the skies of Britain are black with stinking smoke as 6 million sheep and cattle carcasses are incinerated to combat a picornavirus; cattle fed on animal remains have developed Mad Cow Disease, a fatal form of which has infected the brains of humans eating their meat. Gram, a teenager on the brink of a university education he mistrusts, looks to his father for a response, a sign there can be a better world. But Stanley Blackster, a hero to his son back in the days when he fought Slingjaws and Jactators on TV, has since become somehow distracted, drawn inwards and away. Gram can see that his formidable mother The Barracuda is beginning to despise Stanley. But now Insidiator is to be re-screened - could the hero rise again?

Stanley must rouse himself: an expedition to the paradise islands of the Papalinas would surely put things right again for the Blacksters. After all, hadn't The Barracuda once so wanted to see this exotic place from his past? And Gram would finally see for himself the doomed glories of the coral reef. OK, certain firmly submerged incidents were already beginning to stir, but the Blacksters would not be straying from the sun, the sand, the surf and the reef. Tsaramaso Atoll would be at a safe distance of several hundred long sea miles and Stanley would make sure it stayed that way.

Even now Tsaramaso was a place undiscovered by the world, a place of mangrove forest and steaming heat, of giant reptiles and strange birds, of teeming reef fishes and sweating black nights. And of sharks. The ancestral home of the malevolent Boniface clan and their old, eerie notions of power.

The very last place to take your family.