Tales From the Caribbean

These stories tell of buried pirate treasure, gypsy fortune tellers, a young woman who races yachts, a politically-astute coal mine operator from eastern Kentucky, a renegade monk living with a bevy of beautiful former prostitutes from Amsterdam, and a skillful sea captain named Neil, who sails through a storm at the end with a friend from Waynedale (a gentleman once known back home in Indiana simply as the Pirate ).

They are all combined into an overarching story in which a fearless young lad named Shark Boy, who has hunted sharks since he was a small child, has multiple encounters with what he is eventually forced to realize is a prehistoric killer shark, a 60 to 70-foot-long monster called a Megalodon, that was supposed to have gone extinct two million years ago.

These tales were read avidly in the U.S. Virgin Islands when they first appeared in serial form. Their author, John Stark, who sailed the Caribbean himself back in the 1970's and 80's, eventually retired from the sea after his last sailing yacht was sunk in a hurricane, and went to reside in his little house on Genessee in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he lives and writes today.