Nothing in her modest criminal part had prepared her for the hazy and menacing vibe of the hurricane zone. Everyone was on edge; evil, violence and paranoia ripened in the shadows.
(Stormy Weather, page 107)

Stormy Weather is Carl Hiaasen’s sixth novel. It is longer than usual, at 472 pages, and it feels decisively more nihilistic and misanthropic than its predecessors. Boy, is it full of scumbags and sleazeballs!

Just like its predecessors, Stormy Weather rotates around a central theme, in this case the impact of a big hurricane on South Florida (the setting for all Carl Hiaasen’s novels), from which all kinds of other topics and issues spin in gleeful riot.

Actually, I was hoping for some grand set-piece description of a hurricane but the storm itself is strangely absent. The hurricane happens off-stage, as it were, and has been and gone by page 30. What the text consists of is the adventures of a larger-than-usual cast of miscellaneous characters, often lowlife, often criminal, across the comprehensively devastated and trashed South Florida landscape after the hurricane has hit.

In the darkness, she couldn’t see Augustine’s expression. ‘It’s madness out here,’ he said. (p.51)

In most of the previous novels there’s been not only a central theme but a central crime or scam, which then spawns further crimes in a bid to cover it up (I’m thinking in particular of Skin Tight though the same structure informs his most recent book, Squeeze Me) and these subsidiary crimes ramify out into a luxurious growth of garish characters and grotesque incidents.

Stormy Weather feels like a distinct development or offshoot of the basic pattern, in that there is no central crime or scam: instead Hiaasen’s lowlifes and criminals roam across a devastated landscape, meeting, mingling, scamming and attacking each other at will. It reminds me a bit of the late Elizabethan epic poem, The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser (1596). In each of the first two books of the poem one central knight undertakes one clearly defined quest and the reader knows what the themes and issues are. But in books 3 and 4 Spenser lets go this format, relaxes and introduces a fleet of knights and squires and monsters and enemies and lets them roam, apparently at random, across his fairie landscape, characters from one storyline unexpectedly popping up in another character’s story, or disappearing without explanation.

That’s exactly the sense of expertly controlled narrative chaos you get from this novel. And it is, as a narrative structure, of course, entirely appropriate to, and mimics, the main theme of post-hurricane chaos.

Characters

Chief among the characters is our old friend Skink, aka Clinton Tyree, the former governor of Florida-turned-environmental vigilante who’s featured in most of the previous stories (full backstory on pages 142 to 146). Skink catches two students chucking empty beer cans over the side of the Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys and terrifies them into tying him to the guardrail of the bridge so he can experience the full awesomeness of the hurricane’s primal energy. Skink, we are told, has spent the years since he quit as governor on:

a solemn hermitage interrupted by the occasional righteous arson, aggravated battery or highway sniping. (p.146)

Max and Bonnie Lamb are on a week-long honeymoon in Florida but Max (a junior account executive at a New York advertising company named Rodale & Burns) angers his new wife by cancelling their planned trip to Disney World in order to tour the hurricane ruins with a videocamera, even interviewing families shivering outside their utterly wrecked and flattened houses, speculating that he might be able to sell the footage to cable TV. Bonnie realises with a thump that she’s married a heartless schmo.

Edie Marsh is a typical Hiaasen lowlife. Before the hurricane she had been cruising Miami bars determined to hook up with a member of the famous Kennedy clan and marry rich. To her own surprise she does indeed manages to be wined and dined by a minor Kennedy one evening, but completely fails to seduce him. Instead, she finds herself teamed up with ‘Snapper‘ (real name Lester Maddox Parsons, p.386, full backstory, including his upbringing in a Ku Klux Klan family! pages 132 to 133) and, along with him, fakes a scene in which she appears to have been trapped and pinioned under a falling house in order to defraud an insurance company.

They’ve chosen one of a huge estate of houses which were completely flattened by the storm, on the recommendation of a crooked housing inspector they know, Avila, under which to pretend to have been injured. Unfortunately, they’ve picked the house next to Tony Torres, greasy scumbag ‘salesman of the year’ for a company called A-Plus Affordable Homes. Tony won the award for selling hundreds of flimsy trailers which blew away in the first strong wind, producing a cohort of very angry customers. The address Edie and Snapper have chosen is 15600 Calusa and it is destined to become the central location of the novel.

Anyway, at this early point of the story Tony sees through Snapper and Edie’s scam in moments. He’s a no-nonsense hardcase and makes them come and sit in the ruins of his house at gunpoint while he figures out what to do with them. He has two dachshund pets, Donald and Marla.

In other words, a lot of the characters are already two-timing scumbags, even before a big natural disaster like this brings out the worst in people. As Tony Torres says:

‘Because of the hurricane. The whole place is a madhouse!’ (p.31)

Augustine Mojack had just inherited his uncle’s failing wildlife import business when the hurricane hit. Augustine is 32 and independently wealthy. He doesn’t have to work because of the big insurance settlement he received after a boating accident. Augustine’s hobby is juggling skulls (an image picked up on the book’s cover art), medical skulls from hospitals or medical shops. He can juggle up to five at a time. He harbours fantasies of performing some big destructive spectacular theatrical event, though he doesn’t know what.

But the important thing about Augustine is he has just inherited a wildlife import business from his recently deceased uncle. When the storm hits, it devastates the animal compound and cages, releasing a bear, a Cape water buffalo, a cougar, a lion, miscellaneous snakes and lizards, and a bunch of monkeys into the wild.

Ira Jackson is a tough guy from New York (‘a stocky middle-aged stranger with a chopped haircut [and] a gold chain round his neck’, p.210). The mobile home belonging to Ira’s mother, Beatrice Jackson, was blown into fragments and she was killed by a flying barbecue from next door. Unfortunately, Ira remembers the name of the sleazy fat man who sold his mother the trailer and it only takes a phone call to the city records for him to find the address and come looking for… Tony Torres.

Long story short: Jackson finds Edie at Torres’s place, tells her to take a walk, then knocks Torres unconscious, drives him to a remote plot and nails him to an eight-foot satellite dish in the crucifixion position, impaling his body on the central node. Most Hiaasen novels have one or a few central gruesome and macabre incidents or images. Well this is it: a crooked homes salesman crucified to a huge satellite TV dish!

Plot developments

Max Lamb is in the middle of filming yet another distraught home owner in the wreckage of their house when a small monkey darts out of nowhere and attacks him, scratching his face before seizing his camera and scampering off. Max gives chase and is kidnapped by Skink. Skink had enjoyed being tied to the bridge during the storm but it wasn’t as totally awesome as he had hoped. Now he is going seriously off-piste, as indicated by the fact he has taken to smoking toad sweat, which is amusingly referred to as generating ‘Bufo madness’ (p.270).

Skink said, ‘Care for some toad?’ (p.170)

Skink fits an electric shock collar (a Tri-Tronics dog collar) around Max’s neck, tramps him out of suburbia, through woods to a waterway, forces him into a boat, takes him out to an Indian camp in the Everglades and subjects him to various humiliations, all the time asking what he’s doing, the pretentious New York jackass, coming down here to Florida, knowing nothing about the place or people or making any effort to learn etc? Over the coming days we watch as Skink, by repeatedly shocking Max, manages to train him, to make him as obedient as a dog.

Now abandoned, Bonnie Lamb is rescued by Augustine who is out in his car looking for his escaped animals and carrying a tranquiliser dart gun. In all Hiaasen’s novels there is generally one more or less normal, reasonably good guy, strong and capable. Augustine plays that role in this novel. When we see Augustine through Bonnie’s eyes, he is tall, square-shouldered and handsome. Rather gorge, in fact.

Just a reminder of Hiaasen’s good guys:

1. Tourist Season – Brian Keyes, private eye, former journalist
2. Double Whammy – R.J. Decker, private eye, former newspaper photographer
3. Skin Tight – Mick Stranahan, private eye
4. Native Tongue – Joe Winder, reluctant PR man, former reporter
5. Strip Tease – the central figure is probably Erin the stripper, with the good guy role divided between Shad the bouncer and the recurring character, Miami homicide detective Al García

Over the coming days Augustine helps Bonnie try to find her husband, a quest which involves several trips to the city morgue which seem pretty peripheral to the ‘plot’ but give the reader an insight into what a big city American morgue looks and smells like, and a cross-section of corpses each coming with a particularly fruity backstory.

Since Skink periodically allows Max to use payphones (reminding us that this is all set years before the advent of mobile phones) he is able to leave messages on the couple’s answerphone in New York. When Bonnie rings the number, she gets Max’s messages saying he’s OK, but she is distraught and then disgusted to realise he is much more concerned about his work, about the fate of the advertising accounts he’s managing, than he is about her wellbeing or feelings.

As you might have predicted, slowly Bonnie falls for strong, well-armed Augustine, who every night takes her back to his place. He doesn’t lay a finger on her; it is entirely her choice when she chooses to snuggle up in his bed for comfort and then, a couple of nights later, to sleep with him.

Meanwhile, when Edie returns to Torres’ house (remember how Ira Jackson had shooed her away at gunpoint) to find him gone so she sets up base there, it’s as good as anywhere else.

Along comes Fred Dove, an insurance assessor (thousands of them are by now swarming all over the wrecked territory). At first she tries to con Dove into believing she’s Torres’ wife, hoping to get the full $141,000 which she discovers is the payout for Torres’ wrecked house. Unfortunately, Dove finds a wedding photo of Torres amid the wreckage which clearly shows that Torres’ wife was a petite but well-endowed Latina, not Edie. Edie immediately switches tack, makes schoolgirl eyes, apologises, bursts into tears, grabs Dove’s hand and kisses it and manages to seduce him on Torres’ (very uncomfortable) lounger. Having shagged him, Edie now ties him into her plan to defraud the insurance company and split the proceeds. Dove is understandably reluctant and scared of breaking the law, but also ‘pussy whipped’ (definition: ‘dominated or controlled by a woman – typically used of a man’).

A day or so earlier, Edie’s partner, Snapper, had gone on an exploration and fallen in with a bunch of crooked roof repairers organised by Avila the crooked standards inspector. In fact, this little crew know nothing about repairing roofs but realise they can gouge cash deposits from desperate home owners, promise to come back, then disappear with the loot. Snapper has a lucky break when he finds himself selling the crew’s dodgy services to the ditzy woman owner of a big luxury house now minus a roof, Mrs Whitmark, who is only too willing to hand over $7,000 in cash (p.150). With typical deception, he hides this from his fellow scammers when he gets back to the truck where they’re waiting, keeping the cash for himself.

When the woman’s husband, Gar Whitfield, returns and discovers what his wife has done, he is livid. Turns out he is himself a property developer and not only knows Avila but has actively been bribing him, with money, booze and porn to give legal approval to the sub-standard housing Whitefiled has been putting up for years.

So Gar Whitfield rings up Avila and tells him he has enough dirt on him to have him arrested the same day and in prison by nightfall, and has the clout to make sure Avila is put in the same cell as Paul Pick-Percy, a famous cannibal, unless he a) repays the seven grand b) pays for the actual repair of Whitfield’s roof.

This little vignette is a good example of the way Hiaasen depicts corruption within corruption, scumbaggery within scumbaggery. Everyone is corrupt. Everyone is deceiving each other.

What a cold shitty world, thought Avila. There was no such thing as a friendly favour any more; everybody had their greedy paws out. (p.276)

On the plus side, also making a reappearance is Skink’s good fairy, Highway Patrolman Jim Tile, the only black man on the force and the routine target of all kinds of racist abuse from redneck drivers and his own cracker colleagues. In this novel we watch Jim form a relationship with a fellow (white) woman police officer, Brenda Rourke. Unfortunately for her, we then see her try to arrest Snapper, who is ‘one mean motherfucker’ (p.200) and beats the crap out of her. When Jim Tile is called to the scene he is devastated to see his battered girlfriend and vows revenge. A landscape of corruption, theft, embezzlement and extreme violence.

Backstories

I really like the way Hiaasen creates and positions backstories for the characters, not when they’re first introduced but scattered cleverly throughout the text. These backstory interludes break up the flow of the narrative in a very enjoyable way as the forward engine of events is put on hold while we get 2 or 3 pages about the childhood, upbringing and previous adventures of various characters.

It helps that these potted biographies are themselves often every bit as florid and entertaining as the narrative itself, for example the detailed description of Snapper’s upbringing in a household of devoted Ku Klux Klan members is worth reading in and of itself for its sheer amazeballs. Other backstories include:

• Snapper pp.132 to 134
• Skink pp.142 to 146
• Bonnie Brooks pp.216 to 219
• how Avila and Snapper met at a brothel p.264
• how Snapper shot his drug dealer partner Sunny Shea p.386

More plot developments

After crucifying Tony Torres, Ira Jackson discovers that he doesn’t really feel much better, so decides to go after the next person responsible for his mother’s death, the crooked building inspector, Avila, who he again tracks down from city records.

Ira kidnaps Avila and gets him to confess that he didn’t even inspect the trailer homes Jackson’s mother lived in, but ‘passed’ them after being paid a hefty bribe by the builders. Then Ira sets about crucifying Avila, too. He knocks up a makeshift crucifix nailed to a half-destroyed pine tree and tapes Avila’s wrists and ankles to it. He hammers a nail into Avila’s right hand and the latter faints but when he comes round he realises a) he’s alive b) he’s not in agony. He opens his eyes and sees a lion, a lion!!! finishing off Jackson. (The reader realises this is one of the animals who’ve escaped from Augustine’s wildlife centre). The lion has eaten half of Ira. There are bones scattered around and tatters of clothing. Avila freezes and watches the lion as it finishes its Ira Jackson meal, snuggles down and falls asleep. Then very, very slowly Avila unwraps the tape, frees his nailed hand and sneaks off.

Being Hiaasen, having a character eaten by a lion isn’t quite enough. Avila is a devotee of Santería, the Cuban voodoo religion and, as he tiptoes past the snoring lion, he bends down to retrieve one of the wet and glistening bones of what was once Ira Jackson. You never know. Might come in handy in one of Avila’s Santería rituals.

Skink motorboats Max Lamb out to a wooden house on stilts in the part of Biscayne Bay known as Stiltsville. He’s arranged a rendezvous here with Bonnie and Augustine. The encounter is suitably bizarre and surreal, Skink takes off Max’s electric collar and calmly hands him over but announces that he wants to spend some time with Bonnie who is intrigued but not scared byt Skink’s grotesque appearance but calm and polite manner. However, Augustine shoots Skink with the tranquiliser dart gun he’s been carrying round everywhere. Bonnie and Augustine had previously hooked up with Trooper Jim Tile who now supervises them taking tranquilised Skink back to the mainland and helping him recover.

Tile is conflicted. He knows he should arrest Skink for kidnapping Max, but will only do so if Max presses charges. But in the weird, post-hurricane atmosphere, Max realises he’s in more of a hurry just to get back to New York and his job than get involved in a prosecution.

Thus as soon as he can, Max showers, puts on clean clothes and flies back to New York. Bonnie says she feels too ill to accompany him, promises that she’ll catch the next plane. Of course she doesn’t, she misses the next flight, then the one after that, as she falls more and more deeply in love with Augustine. Eventually they sleep together.

The Max-kidnap storyline has run its course. The reader had been in suspense over how it would pan out, and now we know: it ends with a relatively peaceful handover and Skink being brought back into civilisation.

It is replaced as the main motor of the narrative by Our Gang (Jim Tile, Bonnie, Augustine and Skink) setting out to track down whoever it was who savagely beat Brenda. The Max Kidnapping has been replaced by The Brenda Beater Quest. We readers know it was the vile scumbag Snapper. (This creation of an alliance of the good guys, featuring solid Jim Tile and wacky but effective Skink, who then set out to get to the bottom of a crime or mystery, is the characteristic narrative shape of many of the novels.)

While Our Gang is meticulously tracing the stolen car in which the scumbag was riding who beat her up (Brenda remembers its number plate), the narrative cuts away to the further adventures of Edie and Snapper. The central idea is that Edie is now routinely shagging and blowing weak-willed insurance assessor Fred Dove with a view to getting hold of dead Tony Torres’s house insurance. But their plans are complicated by three developments:

1. Fred Dove alerts them to the fact that his supervisor from the insurance company is paying a visit to check on things. Thus Snapper and Edi (who are by this point at daggers drawn; he has tied her up and kicked her in the head, she managed to get free and smashed his knee with a tyre lever; it’s a very uneasy, violent ‘partnership’) are going to have to pretend to be Tony Torres and his loving wife for the duration of the visit. Comic potential.

2. Out of the blue a 71-year-old named Levon Stichler arrives to wreak vengeance on Tony Torres who sold him a crap mobile home which blew away in the storm. He mistakenly goes for Snapper, thinking the latter is Torres. He fails and Snapper beats old man Stichler very badly indeed.

3. Just after that happens, Tony Torres’s real wife, Neria, arrives, having made numerous bewildered phone calls from Eugene, Oregon (the couple are, of course, divorced) where she lives with her lover, Charles Gabler, a professor of parapsychology. Just to enhance the scumbag quotient this  fraudulent professor and exponent of crystals and auras and chakras and so on, had insisted they bring along one of his graduate students, big-breasted Celeste, for the ride to Florida, and Neria kicks him out of the VW camper van when she discovers him screwing the bosomy student.

All this takes place while Our Gang – Skink, Augustine and Bonnie – manage to track down the stolen truck from which Brenda was attacked to outside Torres’s house. They park themselves in a nearby wrecked house and watch the comings and goings listed in 1 to 3, trying to figure who’s who and what the devil is going on.

Journey to the Keys

Rather randomly the action then shifts to the Florida Keys. This is predominantly because Snapper has developed a mad, drug-addled plan to drive a hundred miles south in the stolen Jeep Cherokee he’s been driving, to stay at a motel whose owner owes him some favours, and photograph old Levon in compromising positions with a couple of local hookers Snapper knows (that’s how he knows Avila, they had a double date with these two hookers back in the day), and so blackmail Levon into keeping his mouth shut.

This seems improbably complicated – surely just shooting Levon dead would be more Snapper’s style. But then there’s an unexpected twist. At one point Augustine leaves the house where Our Gang are hiding out and spying on events at the wrecked Torres place, and no sooner has he left than Skink amazes Bonnie by simply walking out of their hiding place and walking bold as brass over to the Jeep Cherokee just as Snapper and and Edie are loading the body of Levon Stichler into it (still alive but gagged and wrapped in a carpet).

Bonnie doesn’t know what to do so goes running after him. Inevitably, Snapper, initially fazed by this strange visitation, simply points his gun and tells them both to get in the Jeep Cherokee and, within a minute, this unlikely foursome (Snapper, Edie, Skink and Bonnie, plus Levon in the boot) are heading south on Highway 1, then crossing the Card Sound Bridge (the very same one which Skink had himself tied to at the start of the story).

Snapper behaves like a pig all the way down, threatening Edie with the gun, a .357, pulling her hair, pushing the gun painfully deep into her breast, getting surly on painkillers and Jack Daniels, as Edie drives them all south. Skink is content to let it all happen but in several key exchanges confirms beyond doubt that it was Snapper who brutally beat up Brenda (and stole her mother’s wedding ring, which she  had been wearing on her finger, into the bargain).

Anyway, through devious plot developments, both Avila and Trooper Jim Tile and Augustine also make their separate ways after the bad guys’ Jeep Cherokee. Why? Avila wants to find Snapper so he can pay him back for pocketing the cash from Gar Whiteside’s wife without telling anyone else in Avila’s little roofer scam. Jim Tile sets off in pursuit because his investigations have led him to suspect Snapper is the man who beat up his girlfriend (something the reader has known all along). And Augustine is after them because he is now in love with Bonnie, and was part of the trio staking out Torres’s house till he snuck off to do a chore and, returning, discovered Skink and Bonnie gone.

(By the way, the Jeep is relatively for the other characters to identify since its mudguards have distinctive painted decals, easily spotted from a distance and confirmed closer up.)

Anyway, the novel rushes towards a farcical climax as all these characters pitch up at the ironically named ‘Paradise Palms’ motel (but then anywhere in Florida with a nice name becomes ironic merely by included in a novel by a novelist who believes Florida is a cesspit of unprecedented human corruption) in the middle of a hot, humid tropical rainstorm.

1. Avila

First incident in the brutal climax is Avila angrily chases Snapper round the car park yelling that he wants his seven grand back. Snapper hands Edie the .357 (why doesn’t she throw it away?) before turning the tables and chasing after Avila. Snapper chases Avila for quite a distance along a rain-drenched highway till they reach a bridge and, as Snapper raises the axle of some trailer over his head to whomp him, Avila jumps over the edge and into the water. The current carries him away. He takes off shoes and clothes and bobs into a block of plywood. He’s clinging to it at dawn when he’s picked up by the coastguard, given clean clothes, a coffee and taken onshore to Immigration control. Suddenly, surrounded by immigration officials who think he’s just another illegal immigrant, Avila realises that, rather than go home to face the wrath of his wife and mother-in-law and Gar Whiteside, what the hell,  maybe he should just let himself be ‘repatriated’ to Cuba and start a new life there.

2. Jim Tile

Trooper Jim Tile has followed the Snapper and Edie’s Jeep Cherokee all the way south. Now he parks aslant the entrance to the car park and walks towards the car. Now, when Snapper had been off chasing Avila, Edie, sick to death of the situation had offered to hand the .357 with its 2 remaining bullets over to Skink but the latter, in his perverse way, had refused and Snapper had snatched it back when he eventually loomed back out of the pouring rain having seen Avila jump off the bridge. Seems like a terrible mistake.

Now, as Jim walks towards the Jeep, Snapper winds down the window and shoots Jim smack in the chest, the trooper going over backwards. This really upset me. Earlier Snapper had shown everyone the ring he had yanked off Brenda’s finger and had casually thrown it into a canal. That upset me, too. The way he casually kicked Edie in the head back in Torres’s house upset me. Now I was upset and depressed by Jim being shot. Someone should have killed Snapper long long ago. Instead, he now drives off, skirting the patrol car, and Edie notices Skink has sunk down in the backseat, for once winded and beaten. Why didn’t he take Snapper’s gun from Edie when he had the chance?

In fact, Jim is not dead. He was wearing a kevlar vest, never goes anywhere without one, so his chest is badly bruised but he’s basically OK. The hookers Snapper had set up to look after and compromise Levon, call 911 and police and ambulance soon turn up. But still. For about ten pages everyone in the car (Skink, Bonnie, Edie and Snapper) think Jim is dead and I thought he was dead and it left a really bad taste in my mouth.

3. Augustine

Augustine had separately followed the Jeep Cherokee south, parked a little up from the motel and seen a lot of this transpire because during the Avila interlude he climbed into the back of the Jeep. A ways up the highway Snapper pulls over into a roadside restaurant car park and steals a new car, belonging to a French architect, Christophe Michel. Even this peripheral and marginal figure gets implicated in the theme of the poor building and design standards which have led directly to people’s homes being wrecked. Turns out Michel was himself about to be investigated for malpractice and so had packed up all his belongings and savings with a view to getting a plane out of America (p.398). It’s very bad luck that Snapper chooses his car (a Seville) to steal at gunpoint, turfs Michel out of it, hustles the three others into it and drives it off.

A little ways further up the highway, Edie notices the black Jeep Cherokee is following them. How? It draws abreast, Augustine winds down the window and fires his tranquiliser dart into Snapper’s neck. Simple as that. Snapper immediately passes out, Edie grabs the wheel and steers them onto the hard shoulder. Here Bonnie is joyfully reunited with big, sensitive and competent Augustine.

Now Skink leads them all on an extended tour into the bush, into the outback, through miles and miles of mosquito-infested backwoods until they eventually reach his camp. Skink lights a fire and cooks some roadkill. Augustine and Bonnie are amazed by Skink’s book collection, which he keeps in an old camper van. (Earlier, in this book’s version of Clinton Tyree’s biography we were told that Clint had, between serving in the army and standing in politics, been a literature professor. I think that’s a new nugget of information about him.)

Long story short:

Snapper bound After confirming it was Snapper who beat up Brenda, Skink ties his hands and wedges his mouth open with one of those security locks you apply to a car steering wheel.

Bye bye Edie Edie is seriously confused by what’s going on and the bewildering shifts in psychic dynamics among the group Skink has led into the outback over the next few days. She reacts the only way she knows how by seducing the alpha male in the pack, following Skink into the lake when he goes for a swim and nibbling and teasing him into making love to her in the water. Skink nonetheless gets her dressed and walks her a long way to a highway where he’s arranged for Jim Tile, now much recovered though still wearing bandages on his chest, to pick her up and drive her over the bridge to mainland Florida. She is back in civilisation. Ho hum. Maybe she can go to a bar and pick up a young eligible millionaire…

Neria strikes it rich For some time we have had bulletins on Tony Torres’ wife, Neria, as she drives with her professor boyfriend all the way from Oregon to Miami. In the final stages she is accompanied by a truckload of Bible-tattooed, God-fearing, in-bred Tennesseeans driving down to make a fast buck as cowboy builders amid the hurricane wreckage.

When she finally arrives at the wreckage of her and Tony’s house at 15600 Calusa, Neria tries to find out from the neighbour what’s been going on, coming across some of Snapper and Edie’s belongings strewn about the place which are, of course, a complete mystery to her. While she’s still puzzling it out, a Federal Express man arrives and hands her a letter. Inside is the insurance checks for $201,000. This is the money Edie spent all that time sucking off insurance assessor Fred Dove to get him to sign off and approve from his employer. Now, ironically, neither Snapper, Edie nor Fred are around to collect it. In fact Fred turns up with some flowers for Edie (throughout the story he’s been staying at a nearby motel on company expenses and motoring over to conspire with and/or be sucked off by Edi). But when confronted by a large angry Neria, timid Fred beats a hasty retreat. Now Neria is rich. Who cares what happened to her lowlife, worthless husband? She’s going to start a new life.

Max Lamb flies back down from New York. (Actually he flies via Mexico where he’s sent by his company to try and persuade the owner of a huge tobacco company, Clyde Nottage, who is dying of cancer, and being treated with sheep semen (!), not to cancelling his huge advertising spend with Max’s firm. To no avail.) Since Bonnie has been able to phone him now and then, she sets up a rendezvous where Max and Bonnie are finally reunited under the watchful eye of Skink and Trooper Tile. She tells him she doesn’t love him. He is livid. Trooper Jim Tile drives him back to the meeting point, a boarded-up MacDonalds, as Max kvetches and whines and complains about ‘women’. Then catches a plane back to the Big Apple and his snazzy career.

Snapper redivivus When Bonnie arrives back at the ‘camp’ after her uncomfortable reunion with her soon-to-be ex-husband, it’s to discover that Snapper caught Skink asleep, has beaten him up and heading off into the backwoods. Oh for God’s sake won’t someone just kill Snapper!!! Bonnie takes off after him which is (once again) plain dumb. She catches up with Snapper and jumps on his back but he easily throws her off, throws her to the ground and starts clubbing her in the head using the big metal car lock rammed in his mouth (it’s stuck in his mouth so he waggles his head from side to side to make the long metal handle clout Bonnie again and again in the face). Then Snapper is aware of someone grabbing him by the balls and a gun goes off at his temple.

Max and Edie Edie had been dropped off by Trooper Jim near where Max now collects the rental car he hired in Miami. Opening the car Max discovers she’s stowed away in it. He offers her a lift, they swap stories, Max begins to like her, Edie realises he’s a successful advertising executive. It’s a mismatch made in heaven.

Snapper abandoned Snapper broke Skink’s collarbone and several ribs. It was Augustine who tracked Snapper down and was tempted to shoot him dead but instead just shot his ear off instead. Augustine and Bonnie patch Skink up, insisting he see a doctor but he refuses. Instead he packs up the camp, packs bags and leads Bonnie and Augustine down a trail to a lake which they swim across, then to a road i.e. civilisation, leaves them there before himself disappearing back into the bush. Skink had told Snapper (with his mouth still wedged open by the car lock and now minus one ear) to make his own way to freedom, confident he won’t, that he’ll die of exposure.

Augustine and Bonnie come to the Card Sound bridge and walk up it. At the crest, at the high point of its gentle slope Bonnie asks Augustine if he’ll tie her to it, in readiness for a coming storm, just like Skink had done at the start of the book. She has become fully nativised.

Brief thoughts

By the time you stagger to the end of this 472-page-long narrative the reader is, I think, exhausted with the unrelenting panorama of scumbag lowlife amorality, violence and corruption. Not just that, but Hiaasen’s novels have a distinctive characteristic which is that they are packed with stuff. Either something is happening, generally something violent and garish, and being described in taut, snappy prose and super-pithy dialogue; or you are being filled in on the background of this or that scam (in this case, extensive explanations of how building regulations in Florida aren’t worth the paper they’re written on). It feels like every inch of the text is packed, there is little fat or respite or padding, nowhere for the reader to pause while enjoying a nice restful description. There is no rest or respite. It’s this unrelenting nature of the text which I think makes many critics describe them as ‘page-turners’, ‘gripping’ and so on.

In my opinion this is slightly wrong. Hiaasen’s novels aren’t really ‘thrillers’ or crime novels in the usual sense because by and large the reader watches the crimes being committed and knows exactly whodunnit. There is none of the suspense associated with crime novels: we saw it happen; we know whodunnit.

Instead the grip or pull of the narrative is the reader’s curiosity about what monstrous grotesque incident Hiaasen is going to pull off next. We don’t read for the plot so much as in eager anticipation of the next stomach-turning and mind-boggling atrocity.

This explains, I think, the sensation I often have of being a little disappointed by the final acts in Hiaasen novels. Quite often they don’t live up to expectations set by earlier macabre scenes. So, for example, I felt Snapper, the evil bastard, deserves a punishment of Baroque complexity and vehemence. It’s certainly grotesque that he ends his days staggering lost through the vast Everglades with his mouth wedged open by a car lock but… well… somehow it doesn’t feel quite adequate to the extended Sodom and Gomorrah of incidents which have preceded it, and to the long list of his disgusting brutality and mindless aggression.

I think Hiaasen often finds it difficult to cap, right at the end of his stories, the inspired grotesqueries he often features half way through. Thus nothing that happens later on can imaginatively outdo the incident of Ira Jackson crucifying Tony Torres on a satellite dish. Somehow that says everything about the society Hiaasen is depicting, its values and morality. He manages to outdo himself when crucifixion number two ends with Ira being eaten by a lion! But he’s set the bar very high in the Gruesome Stakes and, in a way, the entire second half of the novel, the long car journey south to the keys and the rather muddled sequence of events in the car park of the Love Motel in the pouring rain, although it has its moments, feels confused and like an anti-climax. In the end the plot only drags on for its last 100 pages because Snapper keeps hurting people and well before the end I just wanted someone to kill him and bring the novel to a close.

Still. Bloody funny, hair-raisingly amoral, shockingly gruesome, it’s a Hiaasen classic.

Minor details

Donald Trump

Ivana Trump was mentioned in this book’s predecessor, Strip Tease. In this one Bonnie Lamb indicates how shallow her husband is by telling Augustine he doesn’t read much and that the most recent book he’s been reading is ‘one of Trump’s autobiographies’ (p.109).

It’s interesting to learn that Trump and his wife were bywords for flashy superficiality 26 years ago, and all the more mind-boggling that 21 years later he was elected President of the Yoonited States. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer country.

Santería

Briefly mentioned in the last book and emerging as a running topic this one is the Cuban version of voodoo religion, Santería. Avila, the crooked surveyor, regularly sacrifices chickens to Chango, the god of lightning and fire, in a bid to escape the various investigations and prosecutions aimed at him.

To quote Wikipedia:

Santería, also known as Regla de Ocha, Regla Lucumí, or Lucumí, is an African diasporic religion that developed in Cuba during the late 19th century. It arose through a process of syncretism between the traditional Yoruba religion of West Africa, the Roman Catholic form of Christianity, and Spiritism.

The topic is played for laughs as Avila’s sacrifices keep going hopelessly awry, a billy goat he buys to sacrifice brutally goring him in the groin, a raccoon he buys later on scampering free and attaching itself to his mother-in-law’s towering hairdo till Avil sprays it, and her, in fire extinguisher foam. The more earnestly he sacrifices, the worse his luck gets.

It’s also interesting because Santería crops up as a theme in William Gibson’s novel Spook Country, published in 2007 i.e. twelve years after this novel. Interesting in itself, but also because Santeria’s inclusion in these two Hiaasen novels makes you realise it’s a less esoteric and obscure reference than the Gibson novel, and its easily-pleased reviewers, suggest.

Can I hear you knockin’?

You know that cheerful knock on the door pattern many of us give? I’d never heard it described onomatopoeically as ‘shave and a haircut – two bits’.

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Credit

Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1995. All references are to the 1996 Pan paperback edition.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

• Tourist Season (1986)
• Double Whammy (1987)
• Skin Tight (1989)
• Native Tongue (1991)
• Strip Tease (1993)
• Stormy Weather (1995)
• Lucky You (1997)
• Sick Puppy (2000)
• Basket Case (2002)
• Skinny Dip (2004)
• Nature Girl (2006)
• Star Island (2010)
• Bad Monkey (2013)
• Razor Girl (2016)
• Squeeze Me (2020)