Apollo 19 has just splashed down in the heart of the Bermuda Triangle.
With no one inside!
This is the kind of book I was attracted to when I was a young reader. I remember going to a department store and looking through the paperbacks. My limit was about $1.75, and I remember turning away books because they were $1.95, a little expensive for me. This was around 1979.
The Sargasso cover price is $1.95. Today, I bought it for .10cents, so I just had to wait 45 years for the price to come down.
Sargasso is an action adventure novel, a little on the technical side. It begins with the last Apollo mission before the Space Shuttle takes over. A joint mission with the Russians, all goes well with the reentry (narrated on television by Walter Cronkite) until they open the capsule to find it empty!
A hasty decoy broadcast diverts the attention of the world while the President bans all those who know the truth from revealing it. This includes a government underwater energy research ship, a globe sailing adventurer, a top female news broadcaster and various other characters. The research ship is then commissioned by a Hollywood producer to explore the Sargasso sea for an upcoming movie.
Everyone ends up in the Bermuda Triangle area where some strange light effects and odd dusty fog banks occur, power outages and instrument malfunctions begin to plague them. What is causing it all?
Near the end there is also a terrific rogue storm to get through, while several people are trapped underwater in a powerless submersible. They had gone down to explore a strange phenomenon that looked on their monitors like a paved highway! and found instead the real explanation for the whole mysterious incident of Apollo 19.
I must say, there are a lot of characters in various stages of distress throughout the novel and Edwin Corley manages to keep all of them as well as the plot floating right up to about the third to last page, when he resolves all the questions and dispenses them all to their various fates. I won't even mention the Japanese investor aboard, or the Caribbean sailor who was born in 1840, yet still sailing the Sargasso sea!
This is very much in the style of Peter Benchley's The Island or The Deep. The movie Jaws (written by Benchley) is referenced and Sargasso is in the same marina. Written in 1977, it has many (now) humorous moments such as the Hollywood screenwriter erecting a pyramid over his bed (remember pyramid power?) and characters drive Pintos, use only the finest Sony Betamax equipment, and the captain's wife is (in quotes) "liberated".
It had the aura of a book from the seventies, there is something about them at that time. It doesn't seem timeless, it seems from the seventies.
It all adds to the enjoyment of a fun and mysterious tour in the Triangle. If the cover or description appeals to you, I'd recommend it.
1977 / Paperback / 299 pages
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