Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen specializes in a very particular form of satire: trenchant critiques of right-wing politics with a heavy splash of environmental just desserts and very dark humour. In his books, all set in the Louisiana swamps, land developers destroying delicate habitats are skewered (sometimes literally) for their many sins, and the elected officials who help them slide into the abyss alongside. While I don't consider this high literature, when times get rough, he is immensely cathartic to show more read because he envisions a spot of justice in a largely unjust world. In doing so, Hiaasen is drawing on his own long career as a hardhitting journalist from Florida, pulling from real world problems. Amid passages of incredibly kooky humour are very deliberate, tenderly told tributes to Florida's beautiful landscapes: the swamps, the birds, the wildlife.

Fever Beach is the latest iteration in this series of works, picking up from his first book, Sick Puppy. In Sick Puppy, Twilly Spree, a short-tempered heir to an ill-gotten fortune, spends his time enacting specific and very precise revenge on those who despoil his beloved Lousiana landscape. Sick Puppy's opening scene has Twilly chase a man down the highway after the man tosses his used fast food wrappers outside car. Spree, collecting the wrappers, tracks the man to his house, and then uses his sizable fortune to hire a dump truck to unload its contents on the man's illegally parked convertible. Ahhh....just desserts.

In Fever Beach, Twilly is back - this time, because he meets and starts dating Viva Morales. Viva is renting a room from Dale Figgo, a deeply incompetent neo-Nazi. Hiaasen is writing in direct response to contemporary politics, satirizing the American far right. Consequently, Viva's landlord, Dale Figgo, was expelled from the Proud Boys and other militant fascist organisations for accidentally desecrating the statue of a beloved confederate leader at the Jan 6 riot. He's now trying to set up his own neoNazi organisation. There's a usual cast of horrifying politicians funding Dale's neoNazi group, Dale's white-power competitor/buddy named Jonus Onus, a secretive hitman, Dale's boxing pro mother who exercises her skills when she discovers her son's racist rhetoric, and so on. Over Viva's worries, Twilly joins Dale's neoNazi group undercover, and sets off a campaign of sabotage to bring him down. A lot of Nazis get punched.

I've enjoyed Hiaasen's past work immensely. He took on the environmental harm caused by the hospitality industry in Tourist Season, the powerful and corrupt sugarcane lobby in Lousiana in Striptease and the decline of American newspaper journalism in Basket Case. Perhaps it is just recency bias, but Fever Beach felt less skilled, satire-wise, than these works, and more angry. I can't blame him. It is briefly cathartic to read about a world in which evil is conquered by works, but it feels too real - and too impossible - at the same time. show less

To say that [Native Tongue] is a typical Carl Hiaasen is to mislead, in that "typical" is too often a pejorative. With Hiaasen, "typical" is laugh-out-loud, head shaking, raucous, outright fun. His plots and the characters that animate them are over the top...and yet very close to truth and reality.

In [Native Tongue], what powers the action is a theme park in the Florida Keys, a cheesy low-rent DisneyWorld. The impresario of the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills is Francis X. Kingsbury, a man made show more wealthy through condo and resort development on environmentally sensitive land that crowds out wildlife, including endangered species, and pollutes coastal waters. Corruption at all levels of government, of course, enable Kingsburg's projects. What no one knows is that Kingsbury, formerly of New York City, is a beneficiary of the Federal Witness Protection Program, under the auspices of which he was whisked from a federal courtroom, in which he testified against fellow mobsters, to Florida. The mobsters betrayed want him dead (once they find him) but an awful lot of Floridians do too.

Molly McNamara is one such, and she isn't reluctant to take a low road to her goal. The book begins with two low-life numbskulls, driving away from the Kingdom and pitching two ratlike critters out of their pickup's windows. It turns out that Molly hired the pair, Danny Pogue and Bud Schwartz, to steal the two blue-tongued mango voles—the last two of the species, saved from extinction by Mr. Kingsbury's minions. They were supposed to be delivered to Molly. She's not happy when they arrive at her condo without the voles.

"…[T]ell me what happened."
  Before Bud Schwartz could stop him, Danny Pogue said, "There were holes in the box. That's how they got out."
  Molly McNamara's right hand slipped beneath her bathrobe and came out holding a small black pistol. Without saying a word she shot Danny Pogue twice in the left foot…
  "You boys are lying," Molly said.

Mere gunshot wounds can't break up this trio. Molly, Danny, and Brad amble in and out of the storyline right up to the end.

Joe Winder is another. After getting fired from his last newspaper job for being just a little bit opinionated in his reporting, Joe takes a PR job at—most naturally—Amazing Kingdom of Thrills. Joe's self-assigned mission is to bring the kingdom down, by hook or crook. The menace he must dodge is Pedro Luz, the kingdom's security chief, a muscleman so enamoured of steroids that he drags an I.V. stand around with him so he can suck his preferred mix from an I.V. bag.

There's more, but I'll leave it for you to encounter as the story progresses. Hiaasen generates my preferred sort of comfort reading. This 'in gets two thumbs up from me. show less

Soooo…..a reality TV star walks into a local pub & proceeds to crack jokes about the LGBTQ community & motorcycle clubs, unaware he’s in a gay biker bar. What could possibly go wrong?

If you’ve read Hiaasen before you know what will follow…..hilarity, utter mayhem & a cast of loons running amok somewhere in Florida. Oh, and Gambian pouch rats just slightly smaller than a volkswagon.

Let’s see. There’s the eponymous Merry, a young woman who earns her keep “accidentally” rear show more ending cars while attending to some…uh…personal grooming. Andrew Yancy is a disgraced former cop currently living the dream on roach patrol as a restaurant inspector. And “Big Noogie” Calzone, a NYC mobster, is in town to buy sand for the disappearing beach in front of his luxury hotel.

It all begins when Merry (literally) runs into an ambitious Hollywood agent whose biggest client is Buck Nance. Buck started out life as Matthew Morgan Romberg (of the Wisconsin Rombergs) but is now the patriarch of a reality show set in the Keys. Think Duck Dynasty but with chickens.

Buck has a couple of problems. Before they were discovered, he & his brothers were members of a leading cover band. Think ZZTop but with accordions. Then Hollywood came knocking & before they knew it, they were all living on a set in Florida with their families. Buck’s biggest challenge used to be keeping his crazy mistress (she of “the Wet Wolverine” prowess) away from his wife. Now he’s on the run after barely surviving a bar brawl & somehow ticking off the Taliban. Meanwhile his brothers are plotting a coup….

Eventually all characters are involved in a search for the AWOL bearded wonder. Along the way more crazies join the parade in a story that could only come from the slightly disturbed mind of Carl Hiaasen. Nobody is safe as he skewers everyone from politicians & tourists to reality stars & their rabid fans.

The laughs just keep on coming as one OTT situation crashes into another in an impossibly convoluted plot. But Hiaasen also uses his stories to draw attention to Florida’s serious environmental issues & the lack of stewardship that results whenever they interfere with tourist dollars.

So if you’re looking for something to fill the void left by Dostoyevsky or Faulkner, walk away. But if you’re in need of a laugh at the end of a long day pick this up. And just as an aside, if you happen to know what the Wet Wolverine is… show less

On a Caribbean cruise to celebrate their second wedding anniversary, a man shoves his wife overboard, leaving her in the middle of the ocean to either drown or be eaten by sharks. She does neither, though, and instead clings to a bale of marijuana that a smuggler has dumped overboard. The bale carrying the dehydrated and disoriented woman drifts into the vicinity of a retired investigator who lives on an unpopulated island off the Florida coast while he tries to sort out the pieces of his show more own broken life. Together, the detective and the woman plot her revenge while trying to figure out exactly what went wrong with her marriage. Naturally, the two fall in love—or at least something that approximates love under the circumstances—while they solve the crime and help stem the tide of the ecological destruction of the Everglades in the process.

Does any of that—which is the essential plot of Skinny Dip--sound plausible? Of course not, but then implausibility is a big part of the charm of any Carl Hiaasen novel, this one being no exception. Hiaasen definitely mines a familiar vein here, with the usual cast of greedy South Florida low-lifes and con artists doing their usual best to promote their own self-interests while leaving the environment and their fellow men to pay the toll. However, as is also the case in the author’s work, the good guys and gals show remarkable resourcefulness and ultimately win, while the bad guys ultimately lose (some more than others in this case). While Skinny Dip will never be mistaken for Serious Literature—or even place among the best of the mystery genre—it is a cleverly plotted romp that is also very funny despite the occasionally heavy-handed promotion of social causes. It would make a perfect summer beach read, particularly if that beach is located somewhere near Miami! show less