Riptide by Donald Cheatham

Published by Zebra in 1984

This is the Fathom Press re-issue from 2026

Yes! Another hard-to-find 80s paperback is back in print from Fathom Press. Release date today! May 22nd 2026. With new cover art by Stephen Andrade.

Where to begin with Riptide?? I randomly picked up the original about 8 years ago in a used bookstore in Arizona. I don’t remember which one. Probably Book Maze in Mesa. I paid a couple bucks for it. Two dollars for a ticket on the Riptide roller coaster of insanity. This is one of the wildest books I’ve ever read.

When I made my top ten 80s horror paperbacks video I put this book at the top. Number one. But looking back that was probably unfair as this isn’t necessarily a straight horror book. In fact, when I shared the video to the Retro Horror Paperback Art group on facebook one person commented, it’s supposed to be a top ten horror list not a top ten schlock list. Comments like that usually launch nuclear bombs in my brain but for once I had to give it to them, they weren’t wrong. Riptide IS schlock. It’s not groundbreaking, hell, it mentions the movie JAWS multiple times. It knows what it’s doing but I get the impression that Donald Cheatham really meant it when he wrote this. He didn’t sit down to write, Microwave Sharks, or Sand Sharks or even Sharknado – which, BTW, I wouldn’t be surprised if Riptide wasn’t an inspiration for that movie- Donald Cheatham sat down to write an exciting Gulf Coast tale about the small beach community that he knew and lived in, killer wildlife, and a natural disaster that is always looming over the ocean side residents of Florida. Riptide isn’t JAWS but it’s not Cruel Jaws or The Last Shark either. It’s its own thing and it’s ridiculous and bloody and horny and most importantly it is not self-aware which makes all of the craziness charming. Other than some articles in his local newspapers Donald Cheatham didn’t write anything else besides this book. And let me tell you, this is B-book royalty and though I probably wouldn’t put it at the top of my 80s horror paperback book list if I did it again, it would definitely get the number one spot on my top ten absolute fun list.

Our hero in Riptide, and I use that term in the loosest possible sense, has a backstory that sounds like it would have been an action-packed crime thriller best seller. Michael Stark was a St Louis cop who took on a sniper serial killer in a long and drawn-out manhunt. The killer was someone from his past who was now massacring innocent people in St. Louis for a wrong he believes Stark did to him. The sniper’s body count is hilarious and gives you a little taste into what is to come; pregnant women, children Etc. Stark has a downtown shootout with him near a floating McDonald's on the river. St Louis people…did you really have a floating McDonald’s in the early 80s?? Tons of innocent bystanders get killed. It reminds me of the movie Demolition Man. The case and publicity ruin his life, so he leaves his family and moves to Florida to take this easy job as a detective in the small beachfront town of Surfside.

So basically, Riptide is the after-story of the tough as nails cop who went one-man-army against a psycho killer who is now taking it sleazy in big titty bikini land, sort of battling a giant tiger shark and surviving a devastating hurricane.

A huge part of what makes Riptide so fun is you never where it’s going. There are so many avenues this goes down that will make you literally say, “wait, what?” out loud.

So normally when I do reviews, I do an in-depth set up, talk about the general plot and then what I thought about it. But with the way Riptide plays fast and loose I feel like it might be better to give a little sample of what this book has to offer. I mean the basic set up is- ex St Louis-super cop gets new position in beach town, meets a plethora of smoking hot to trot ladies that he must navigate through, he has to catch a rapist on the nude beach, and there is a giant tiger shark eating people but in the end it doesn’t matter because a catastrophic hurricane is about to kill ninety thousand people. And we’re there for all of it. Crime, horror, sleaze and disaster novel all rolled into one.

Right away we get our first shark kill. A man sitting on the edge of a dock, completely out of the water is attacked when a rushing explosion of sharp-teeth shark-mouth chomps down on his leg and drags him in; a gurgling scream reaches no one’s ears from under the surface of the water.

Our hero Stark shows up at his new Surfside precinct. Yes, our hero’s name is one letter off from the word shark in a book about a killer shark. Stark is taken aback that not only is his superior Liza Sallings a woman, but she is also incredibly hot. You are probably wondering about her bra size. Well don’t worry because Cheatham lets us know it’s a 36D. These first two chapters are the perfect introduction to this book. Here is what’s on the menu, insane shark attacks and porn stars playing the roles of professional career women and neither ever lets up.

Let’s take a quick look at a small sampling of the insanity:

A shark chomping off a person’s head

A bus full of the elderly drowned

Hurricane winds blowing people’s skin right off their bodies

A guy riding a shark

A hurricane orgy with a death count

Undercover at the nude beach

Shark-Stark staring contest

Fires, floods, tan lines, no tan lines, hammerheads, hangovers, legs, pubes, killer pebbles, orgies, guns, tiger sharks, Jaws references, snakes, boobs, police work, bikinis, mothers and children eaten by sharks, incest twins eaten by sharks, cheating wives eaten by sharks, tourists eaten by sharks who are then immediately eaten by a bigger shark, and surprisingly lots of factual information on the ocean, sharks and hurricanes.

I’m going to go a little more in depth from here on out. If this book sounds like something you want to read already, stop reading right now and go buy it from fathompress.com. If you want to hear a little more and don’t mind lite spoilers- as if you could spoil this- stay tuned because there is no way I am not talking about the nude beach scene. I have to tell someone. It’s one of those things.

So, after we get our character introductions, we get Sallings in the world’s smallest bikini driving her and Stark in her yacht/houseboat out to a shipwreck crime scene. We get Stark watching ladies play with their pubes on the nude beach through binoculars from his 20th floor condo. Of course we get interspersing shark attacks throughout all of this. Stark and Sallings start to put together that there is a very big shark behind all these gruesome ocean events. Stark goes out with Sallings and meets a group of her hot younger friends who all want him. Being the good guy that he is he only takes one home. Stark finds a dead body on his first trip to nude beach. When he goes to see the medical examiner to discuss the body, surprise, it’s a woman and she is flirty and pretty hot. She suggests Stark go talk to this shark expert who happens to be in town. You all aren’t going to believe this. Are you ready? It’s a woman and she is smoking hot. She is wearing a thin little low-cut dress and much to Starks’ delight he could see that she was suntanned but didn’t have any bathing suit marks. Hello nude sunbathing Dr. Shark Expert!

From the very first chapter the looming threat of this giant hurricane is approaching. We start to get chapters from the Weather Institute perspective. I’m no meteorologist but Cheatham drops a lot of technical weather data here that sounds completely legit. Also, because it’s his style, there is a young woman who works at the institute trying to get her male co-worker’s attention by not wearing a bra to work. It’s insane! It is literally a sentence about her not wearing a bra at the end of a paragraph about the oncoming hurricane.

During the hurricane finale there are many inventive and hilarious kills but one of my favorites is there is a group of beach party people who decide to have a hurricane party which then turns into an orgy. While a man and woman are going at it, a hurricane wind blows the door off the building and the man who was on top goes right into the cement wall but the woman who is so in the moment doesn’t notice and keeps thrusting her pelvis in the air even after the man is gone.

The hurricane in this book is where I believe Sharknado might have got its premise. Obviously, the town floods during the storm and now we have killer sharks swimming through the streets. Now at the time this was written I don’t know if this was an original idea or maybe a Florida urban legend but in reality, this is something that is extremely rare. And they don’t go around munching people. I saw a few articles about it online. It actually has a bigfoot type legend around it. Google “hurricane shark” and you’re in for a treat.

And finally the undercover at the nude beach scene.

Though our focus has pretty much been on this dang shark eating people up and Stark meeting ladies for some reason we now have our Police Chief yelling at us about catching this rapist on the nude beach. Um. Ok.

Stark and Sallings need to take care of business, and first order of business is heading down to that nude beach to look for clues. You can’t be walking around in your clothes on nude beach asking questions; everyone will know you are cops. So, you must go undercover as nudists. AND it’s going to be a rough job, so you better take super sexy Hispanic officer, Juanita Hernadez.

Down at the beach Hernandez pops it all off and starts piling suntan lotion on. Stark goes next. She starts rubbing oil on him, including a close up of his backside. Sallings is next. The carpet matches the curtains. We take a second and admire all three bodies. Wait isn’t this a book about a killer shark?

While naked and combing the beach looking for clues, a group of dolphins is spotted and mistaken for sharks. But wait! A little boy watches a giant shark jump out of the water and eats a dolphin. A little girl is sitting in the water smacking it with her shovel to get the dolphins to come to her. Hold on! Hold on! Stop the review. What the hell are children doing on the nude beach?! Did the author forget where he was? Yes, he did because Stark happens to notice the shadow of the giant shark heading for the little girl, so he grabs her and scoops her into the air as the shark comes almost completely out of the water and on to the beach. Yes, naked Stark swinging and swaying holding a five-year-old girl in the air while a 20-foot tiger shark is snapping its jaws trying to get a delicious human in its mouth.

Stark puts the girl down and starts hitting the shark with a piece of driftwood. Still naked, mind you! And then throws a couple rocks. This makes the shark angry. It slides back into the water. But as Stark is walking down the beach they notice the shark is following him. Back and forth. Now it’s personal! The two stare each other down. Eyeball to Eyeball. Finally, Hernandez shows up with the bathing suits and automatic rifles but it’s too late the shark has swam off.

Need I say more?! Go buy this book now!