The Big Bamboo

The Serge Storms series by Tim Dorsey is bananas. Serge is insane and usually off his meds. His eternally stoned sidekick Coleman is either going along with whatever Serge wants or randomly messing up Serge's well laid plans. Usually, these books are some version of Serge's love of Florida and its history.

This time around the story is set mainly in LA and Hollywood where a massively overbudget film is getting no closer to being finished and the studio owners and their Japanese investors are increasingly frustrated with the director.

Then the lead actress gets kidnapped, and an innocent young screenwriter is accused of the crime, but he didn't do it.

The rest gets even crazier than the usual Serge and Coleman adventures. The twists keep show more twisting and keeping track of who is conning who is nearly impossible but also hilarious.

Very dark humor and remember that Serge is technically not a serial killer. He just keeps coming across people who need killing. show less

This book had its shining moments, and the underlying story, or backstory, was actually pretty great, but I didn't believe that it was presented all that well. Serge too was good, not great, and Coleman was more annoying than usual.

The backstory turns out to be fairly simple, and I loved that. But to get there the story was all over the place. As I mentioned above, I don't think the narrative did it justice, nor, ultimately, the amazing cast of characters. It took forever, until the very end, to see how it was all tied together; if this was a whodunit then maybe that would have worked, but in this case just made the story over-the-top wacky.

I liked that Serge went to California and took his arcane movie history to Hollywood. I thought show more all of that was well presented, and taking a jab at the esoteric lifestyle surrounding the film industry was also very good.

In any case, we still get some vintage Dorsey through the eyes of Serge like...

************

A '71 Buick Riviera was stuck in a sea of traffic on U.S. 192. A hundred cars moving a few blocks a time, traffic light to traffic light, all red.

The light turned green. A minute later, the Riviera began moving slowly. The same light turned red again.

Serge smacked the steering wheel. "I can't tell you how crazy this kind of traffic makes me. Why are all these people going this way?"

Coleman drained a beer and crumpled the can. "We're going this way, too."

"But they're making lifestyle mistakes. We're driving for truth."

[And.]

The Chrysler made a pair of lefts. The black Grand Marquis remained a half-dozen lengths back. Serge raced up an entrance ramp to the freeway. He slammed to a stop.

Coleman grabbed the dash. "What happened?"

Serge pointed up beside the car. "Ramps in California have traffic lights."

************

It has been so long since I had to navigate through hell that I had totally forgotten that some people actually accept living in places that put traffic lights on the interstate entrance. Lifestyle mistakes to the Nth degree. And I always thought the same as Serge watching people parked on the I405, I have always wondered why the people that go north in the morning didn't find jobs in the south, and vise verse. Nope that would make too much effing sense.... show less

Serge and Coleman do Hollywood (California). Although Serge doesn't temper his high octane madness in this visit to the other, and Serge might say lesser, Hollywood, it is almost subsumed by the inherent local insanity. In Los Angeles Serge almost isn't the craziest one in town. He still finds inventive ways to murder the opposition, and manages to outwit those he doesn't kill. He temporarily transfers his obsession with Florida history to Hollywood and the film industry. But in the end, Serge just doesn't seem like Serge outside of his Florida.

Like Carl Hiaasen, Tim Dorsey has created some of the quirkiest, most absurd and funniest characters in book history. Like Hiaasen, Dorsey's writing is hilarious. Unlike Hiaasen, however, I think this one story is plenty enough for me. The book was like someone with ADHD on speed. It moved like lightning and never slowed down. Ever. Serge Storms is exhausting and I do not need to go any further. Honestly, the only reason I finished this book is that George K. Wilson is such an epic narrator. His flawless narration was awesome. I wonder if he reads any Hiaasen.

I think this is the weakest of this series so far, largely because it strays from Florida. California, especially Hollywood, is understood to be full of crazy people, but part of the charm of these books is the way Dorsey pulls real Florida characters and scenes and spins their internal craziness out into the "real world." I also felt that the plot depended way too much on Serge moving toward a single goal for way, way too long. He has the general attention span of a gnat, and while he does show some of his usual ping-pong behavior here, it is all while participating in a complicated interaction with lots of characters. While there is no doubt that Serge is smart enough and creative enough to pull this off, he would also change his mind show more and start an equally complex scheme to take over the world sun screen market after about four hours.

That said, and even that much of the plot isn't obvious until the last few pages of the novel, it's a wild, fun ride, and Serge is a homicidal hoot. show less

This was terrible. No two ways about it. The plot sounded interesting, and could have been very good. But the dialogue was atrocious with lines like "You just murdered the famous actress Alley Street" or "Look there's boy band heartthrob Jason Geddy" . And with "current" celebrity references to Cher and Cindy Crawford, along with swipes at tourists and their "instamatics", and you can see this is cutting edge stuff. I gave up before I got to the Bernie Getz and Ronald Regan jokes.

Not really my cup of tea. Trods the same ground as Carl Hiaasen, only not as well. Serge and his drug addict buddy travel to California from their native Florida, meet up with redneck and Japanese Mafia-types, shaft a movie studio. I will say I absolutely hated this book at page 100 but that it did grow on me a bit by page 200 or so. The plot was very thin on the ground, but the humor worked enough to keep me turning the pages. Would I read another of Dorsey's novels? Maybe, but I'd have to be in the right mood, and I expet to do so no time soon.